For those of you who use Windows 10's Storage Spaces, ensure you are careful with it as a "parity" drive isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I recently had my 4Tb (3x 2Tb) Storage Spaces parity drive fail, but all drives were "OK" and "Healthy" despite Storage Spaces saying there was a critical write failure. After some research, I'm not the only one to have Microsoft's highly boasted storage system decide to make all the data contained within unavailable.

All of this happened just before Christmas, of all times, so it wasn't a friendly sight to say the least. Worst of all, I lost scripts that took hours (or even days) for me to write, including those for a lot of my automation. I also lost every picture I've ever taken with with my photography gear as well as a lot of my important storage that was supposed to be safe thanks to a parity drive. The remaining near 3Tb of data was a bunch of games and software which, while it'd be a pain to get them back, aren't worth shedding a tear over.

I did some research and found some software called ReclaiMe which thankfully found the Storage Spaces parity drive, discovered all the files on said drives, and I was able to use an extra 300Gb drive to recover everything important that wasn't just games or easy to redownload software. I was even able to get a few less-than-important movies and etc that were in my storage, along with a lot of work-critical material.

It was a tough bullet to bite, seeing the drive die (only to work after I recreated the parity array), but it's working again with all my important data recovered and the forfeited data being redownloaded, as well that I'm using my 300Gb drive now as a backup for all that important data that I don't wanna lose.

Thank goodness ReclaiMe worked, dang Microsoft for making a sketchy software raid "solution" without ensuring that would happen...and if nothing else, just be careful if you're using Storage Spaces. Hopefully sharing this will help anyone who is using it or might have encountered the same issue.