backing up and restoring a raid 10 drive.

If you have the time and money, use R-Studio.  You can create individual drive images and goof around with the configuration and rebuild virtually, leaving your original copy untouched.  I want to say we spent about 100$ on it.  Worked like a champ.

http://www.r-tt.com/

Data is data is data.  Make a full backup using your "normal" backup environment.  Then, plus in an external USB drive, and make a second backup to that drive.  (If you're paranoid like me, do a third backup.)

Then, reboot the box and get into the RAID BIOS.  Do whatever you need there -- remember to triple-check BEFORE you do everything that you are working on the right volume.

Once done, reboot the box, then recreate drive D: on the empty drive subsystem, and finally restore the data from the external drive to the newly-created drive.

Safest and cheap way is to shut the system down, boot to LINUX on a USB stick, and then use some freebie linux-based partitioning/cloning software to move over data (to a virtual machine or another disk on another computer as a test)

Trick is you want to make 100% sure the backup is good, and you test a restore BEFORE you rebuild the source disk.  So free up disk space on another computer and use that for a dry run.

Make sure that the backup you create is protected on a RAID system, and not just copied to a single disk drive.  Murphy's laws, and all of that ..

Conceptually, i know what i need to do (backup, recreate and restore). I guess i'm looking for someone who has experienced with something similar to my situation. And i'm looking for more of a step by step guidance. I have cloned workstations but never servers. My main concern is that after the restore, the SQL server stops working. This is a production server and it can't be down for too long.  

Thanks.

I was wondering if it is even safe to do. I have the OS in the C drive. The SQL installation in the D drive and the SQL log files in the E drive.

Just shut the system down and boot to a different O/S, like LINUX, and you can backup, clone, whatever without any risk of hurting your original disks by just using any of the freebie partition cloning packages that you can download for free.

But if you want online backup (meaning windows-based that runs while the system is booted), you'll need to buy some commercial software.

if i want to do an online backup with symantec backup, is it best to shutdown sql services first?