How to Use Storage Spaces on Windows 10 for Data Backups

Free up space and reduce errors

If you’ve built up a large amount of data on your computer, you may not always have enough space to store everything. Sometimes you’ll need additional storage to hold the larger files orcloud storage, but even those fill up fast.

With Windows 10 Storage Spaces, you can organize and consolidate all your files using a software-configured, RAID-like technology.

We’ll walk you through how to use the Storage Spaces feature on Windows 10 to create data backups.

What is Storage Spaces on Windows 10?

The Windows 10 Storage Spaces feature helps increase the amount of storage on your PC while protecting your data and storage from drive read errors or driver failures.

The feature is implemented in software similar toRAID, and can be used to group hard drives together into one virtual drive. It can alsomirror dataover several drives for redundancy.

From this pool, you can create Storage Spaces, which store extracopies of your data. This way, if one drive fails, youdon’t lose all your databut still have intact copies available.

Plus, you can add more drives to the storage pool in case you run low on capacity in the pool of drives.

How Storage Spaces on Windows 10 Works

The Storage Spaces feature helps you combine multiple hard drives with duplicate mirrors of files into a single storage pool instead of spreading all your files across multiple drives. This way, you have one unified volume and add redundancy. If one drive fails, you can add another one and rebuild the storage without anydata loss.

Storage Spaces works like RAID, except you don’t need another hardware RAID card because it’s performed entirely via software. It won’t perform as fast as a RAID card, but it’s easier and cheaper to implement if you’re using it for the first time.

Plus, Windows sees your Storage Spaces as any other hard drive – a unified volume with one drive letter and folders that work similar to any other folders. This means you can add your folders to libraries or share them with others on your network.

How to Create a Storage Space in Windows 10

To create a Storage Space in Windows 10, start by connecting the storage drives to your computer.

Note: You can use an internal orexternal hard driveor a solid state drive (SSD) to create Storage Spaces in addition to the drive where Windows 10 is installed. Other drive formats you can use includeUSB, ATA, SATA, and SAS drives. However, you can’t use a microSD card to create Storage Spaces.

Note: Once you set the resiliency or file system, you can’t change it. You can rename a pool or space, add more drives and upgrade the storage space on-demand. Plus, for your drive to be available in Storage Spaces, it has to be around 5GB of size.

Note: Whenever you add new drives to a Storage Spaces pool, optimize the drive usage tomove some of the data to the new drive. This way, you’ll make optimum use of the pool’s overall storage capacity. If you add a drive before upgrading a pool, you’ll need to optimize your drive usage manually.

How to Add a Drive to Storage Spaces

Now that you have your Storage Spaces, you can use your PC normally. However, if you run low on space again, you can easilyadd more storageto the storage pool.

Windows will finishmoving your dataand you’ll have a much larger pool of drives.

How to Disconnect a Drive From a Storage Space

Once you configure a Storage Space, you can remove a drive that’s in use from a pool. If you just yank the drive out, you could lose your data and cause other issues, but there are steps to do this by moving the data on the drive to other drives in the storage pool and then removing the drive from your PC.

Note: Once you disconnect the drive, you won’t be able to access it in File Explorer. To do so, you’ll need to right-clickStart > Disk Managementand find the drive labelledUnallocated. Right-click the drive, selectNew Simple Volumeand follow the steps to reformat the drive in the Disk Management utility.

How to Delete a Windows 10 Storage Space or Storage Pool

If you don’t need the storage space anymore, you can delete it using these steps.

Note: You can’t delete a pool that contains a storage space. To do this, remove all the storage spaces within the pool first, and then delete the pool. Once you delete a storage pool, the drive in use will be restored to your PC, and you can reformat it via Disk Management.

Add More Storage to Your PC

Creating and using Storage Spaces in Windows 10 may seem a bit confusing, but with the steps above, you should be able to do it by yourself.

Share with us your experience creating and using Windows 10 Storage Spaces by leaving a comment below.

Elsie is a technology writer and editor with a special focus on Windows, Android and iOS. She writes about software, electronics and other tech subjects, her ultimate goal being to help people out with useful solutions to their daily tech issues in a simple, straightforward and unbiased style. She has a BCom degree in Marketing and currently pursuing her Masters in Communications and New Media.Read Elsie’s Full Bio

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