Partition Backup of Win7-64 RAID 1 took down my RAID array

I do not recommend using the partition feature. It caused a 2 disc RAID 1 array to fail and it was extremely frustrating for me to have to stop everything else for a complete re-install that should never have happened.

The story...
Acronis was very accommodating when one of my clients went from XP to Win7-64. (This was an entirely clean install, not an upgrade.) They re-sent her the Acronis True Image Home 11 via email so she could re-install to the new OS and keep using it as a backup solution. I did the installation.

After getting her all up and running, I immediately wanted to back up. Instead of doing a disc image of the new OS (as I had done many times before with XP Pro) I used the "Partition Backup" feature to backup all partitions of her 2 disc 320G Seagate Barracuda RAID 1 configuration. Just two partitions, a 80G System and Data (mostly free), with none of that extra nonsense with the Win 7 hidden MBR in a 100MB partition or whatever. I did away with all that during install.

After backup up the partitions, I booted from the Acronis loader CD to be sure the backup on the USB disc was readable and bootable. Everything looked OK.

I CANCELED out of that recovery screen. I restarted as usual.

Everything was a total nightmare from there on. The RAID array was trashed. All I could get into was the BIOS. I had to re-install Windows 7, and recover the data from the backup. But there were a lot of fixes along the way. It proved very time consuming. I changed the RAID cfg from RAID 1 to RAID 0 after it failed, and this time I installed Win 7 onto Raid 0. I had to deal with the Win explorer error where no windows will open because Windows cannot find the User files. I had remapped her MyDocuments and all her user data to the Data partition. It's a damn good thing I made a backdoor admin account that I left alone. I wouldn't have known how to do that any other way.

This was not a "play" computer, this was a business machine with critical files for an entire company.

I do not recommend using the partition feature. Just verifying that the backup was readable caused the RAID 1 array to fail and cost me a full day. It never should have happened. It was worrisome and nerve racking as well. I emailed Acronis support as soon as it happened, and flagged the messages as CRITICAL and IMPORTANT all over the place. It took them about 3 BUSINESS DAYS to answer me!! Ha. Pretty bad.