Sharepoint 2010 Search Index Mirror

Question

I recently had to change the disk that had the SharePoint Search Index inside and went into a little trouble doing that. Everything went ok but doing my research I found out that I can create a mirror of my Search Index that can work as a fail-over if something happens to the first.

Since I will be adding this mirror a long time after the first started storing index files, I am wondering if the mirror will collect all previous data from the first index partition or if it will only store new indexes.

In better words, by adding a mirror, will I automatically have a backup or do I need to run a full crawl to have everything on both partitions?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The answer to this is yes. I found no official documentation, but after reading in some blogs/forums that it would copy I decided to give it a try. The result is that when you add a mirror all the data of the previous index is copied to the new partition. Hopefully this will serve as reference for someone later on.