Is it possible to reduce the number of physical disks in a running RAID-10?

Question

RAID

Hello! There is a server on Windows server 2012r2 on hardware RAID-10 of 12 physical disks. When trying to backup using the OS, an error occurs that the volume size is more than 16 TB. Is it possible to reduce the number of disks in a RAID so that the virtual disk size is less than 16 TB without doing a backup and then restore, on a working system? Virtual disk - 1, 32 TB in size.

Answer 1

I do not understand what exactly you have there virtual.
You can’t change the raid configuration (it seems you can increase the number of disks), but you can operate with logical disks on top of it (partitions and file systems), I don’t remember if it’s windows2k skillfully, but now windows can, there are a lot of third-party utilities or regular ones in linux (boot from livecd ), you can physically shrink the partition using free space (unfortunately, not completely, there are non-movable areas), move it, create new ones, etc.
about the backup, you can change its settings, create several, working with different directories, choosing in such a way that the requirements for the backup become less
ps in linux, software raid based on the btrfs file system can shrink and grow on the fly (an error will occur if there is not enough space), but I would not recommend it for production.