Making a copy of my hard drive

[I'm Sasquatch]

I did a search but didn't find what I was looking for. Or, maybe I did find it but didn't understand the technical talk.

What I would like to do is make a perfect copy of my hard drive. I have an external drive that I want to copy to. I tried copying to my external, but during the process it says xxx file is in use and aborts the process. I've searched for the file/program it says is in use and can't find it so I'm not sure how to shut it down.

I did find a backup feature on Windows XP. One option is to back up all information on this computer. If I use that, will it make a perfect mirror image of what my C drive is? I want ALL of my programs to function and all data backed up if my C drive zonks out. Am I making any sense at all?

I did a google search and found out about the Microsoft backup feature here-

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/maintain/backupfiles.mspx

Any information/suggestions are appreciated.

[Nortelbert]

Norton Ghost will do this for you.

[digirebelva]

Norton Ghost will do this for you.

+1 on ghosting the drive..

driveimage xml is free for home use

http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

[In2Photos]

I like Acronis True Image.

[windpig]

Acronis if great!

[tim]

Ghost will work, and will make a huge image file that you can keep as a backup. If you simply want to move all your files to another drive, try the free xxclone on windows. Don't get suckered into paying for it.

[I'm Sasquatch]

I downloaded a free trial of Acronis. I've tried multiple times to copy my drive and it causes my computer to freeze up each time. It did manage to copy about 8gb one of those times.

I downloaded Driveimage too, but have no idea how to use it. It says I have to partition my drive... I have no idea how to do that. I'm hesitant to screw around with it too much because I don't want to lose what is already on that drive.

Norton will have to wait. I'm not paying 60 bucks for something that I know can be done easily and for free. I'm just not able to figure this out just yet.

[tim]

Norton will have to wait. I'm not paying 60 bucks for something that I know can be done easily and for free. I'm just not able to figure this out just yet.

Ghost will work, and will make a huge image file that you can keep as a backup. If you simply want to move all your files to another drive, try the free xxclone on windows. Don't get suckered into paying for it.

Try my suggestion before you give up.

[I'm Sasquatch]

My desktop, which I'm trying to copy, has XP Home SP3 but no 'backup' tab under programs->accessories->system tools. My laptop has 'backup' listed here. I'll keep looking around.

Thanks for your help Tim (and everyone else).

Jason

[tim]

My desktop, which I'm trying to copy, has XP Home SP3 but no 'backup' tab under programs->accessories->system tools. My laptop has 'backup' listed here. I'll keep looking around.

Thanks for your help Tim (and everyone else).

Jason

It might just not have been installed with windows. But either way, it's not that useful.

What are you trying to do? Move your OS to another drive? Or just move data around? XXclone will do either, easily. The one gotcha is it wipes the target drive before it does the copy. And if it's an OS you're copying you have to go into the tools menu (I think) and choose "make bootable".

[Titus213]

Acronis True Image does work. It's not $60

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Acronis&x=0&y=0

[kachemak]

I have the same question, but am a little unclear about what cloning can do since I never used cloning software. I would like to connect an external USB drive and make an exact clone of my internal system drive once everything is installed and updated. Then - in the even my internal drive dies - take the external drive I used to make a clone, connect it to the motherboard in place of the dead drive and have it boot up. Then I would just have to restore any photo, Word, etc. files changed since the drive was cloned. Make sense? Which of the above mentioned softwares will do this? I will download trials and experiment this weekend. Thanks.

[digirebelva]

I have the same question, but am a little unclear about what cloning can do since I never used cloning software. I would like to connect an external USB drive and make an exact clone of my internal system drive once everything is installed and updated. Then - in the even my internal drive dies - take the external drive I used to make a clone, connect it to the motherboard in place of the dead drive and have it boot up. Then I would just have to restore any photo, Word, etc. files changed since the drive was cloned. Make sense? Which of the above mentioned softwares will do this? I will download trials and experiment this weekend. Thanks.

Cloning your drive will do just what you want. It makes an exact copy of your HD at that moment, allowing you to remove the old HD & put in the cloned HD and the machine will not know the difference...it will run as before

[I'm Sasquatch]

I have the same question, but am a little unclear about what cloning can do since I never used cloning software. I would like to connect an external USB drive and make an exact clone of my internal system drive once everything is installed and updated. Then - in the even my internal drive dies - take the external drive I used to make a clone, connect it to the motherboard in place of the dead drive and have it boot up. Then I would just have to restore any photo, Word, etc. files changed since the drive was cloned. Make sense? Which of the above mentioned softwares will do this? I will download trials and experiment this weekend. Thanks.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do. I haven't been able to make the Acronis software work-my computer keeps freezing up in the middle of the process. I'm too computer illiterate to know how to fix it. I'm left with 2 options.

1. Throw my computer in the river. I'll feel a lot better initially. :lol:
2. Bribe a buddy with food to help me out. Much more friendly to the environment and my mental health as well.

I'm thinking about going with option 2.

[tim]

I have the same question, but am a little unclear about what cloning can do since I never used cloning software. I would like to connect an external USB drive and make an exact clone of my internal system drive once everything is installed and updated. Then - in the even my internal drive dies - take the external drive I used to make a clone, connect it to the motherboard in place of the dead drive and have it boot up. Then I would just have to restore any photo, Word, etc. files changed since the drive was cloned. Make sense? Which of the above mentioned softwares will do this? I will download trials and experiment this weekend. Thanks.

XXclone, or ghost. The former's free, the latter not, but is maybe handier - it creates a compressed image file that you can just keep on a hard drive and uncompress if you need it.

Before you clone or ghost a drive try and reduce or eliminate the paging file, empty the recycle bin, and delete any temporary files.

[ocabj]

Just boot of a Linux live cd like Ubuntu or Knoppix. Mount your internal and external drives and do a cp -R <internal> <external>.

You can probably dd the drives, as well, and it may even be faster with regards to I/O.

[tim]

Linux seems like the hard way to do it given there's windows software that'll do it while windows is running. dd also seems like it could cause problems...

dd is used to copy a specified number of bytes or blocks, performing on-the-fly byte order conversions, as well as more esoteric EBCDIC to ASCII conversions.[2] dd can also be used to copy regions of raw device files, e.g. backing up the boot sector of a hard disk, or to read fixed amounts of data from special files like /dev/zero or /dev/random.[3]

It can also be used in computer forensics when the magnetic pattern of an entire disk needs to be preserved as a byte-exact copy. Using cp would not be possible because data from deleted files still physically present on a disk are not visible through the file system interface.

It is jokingly said to stand for "data destroyer" or "delete data", since, being used for low-level operations on hard disks, a small mistake, such as reversing the if and of parameters, may accidentally render the entire disk unusable.

[kachemak]

Thanks for the responses. If I have time this weekend I think I'll give XXclone a try. After backing up all my files, of course!

[gcflora]

I use DriveImage XML... it's free for personal use and you can combine it with Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD so that you can boot into Windows off a CD/DVD and use the DriveImageXML from there. It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite easy. The combination makes an "image" of the hard disc that you can restore from later.

[tim]

I use DriveImage XML... it's free for personal use and you can combine it with Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD so that you can boot into Windows off a CD/DVD and use the DriveImageXML from there. It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite easy. The combination makes an "image" of the hard disc that you can restore from later.

Excellent, basically an open source ghost clone. Bookmarked! :)

[kachemak]

I use DriveImage XML... it's free for personal use and you can combine it with Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD so that you can boot into Windows off a CD/DVD and use the DriveImageXML from there. It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite easy. The combination makes an "image" of the hard disc that you can restore from later.

So if it creates an image file rather than simply copying each file on the drive, would I then use DriveImage to extract the image file to a new hard drive if it ever needed to be replaced? Sounds like I have lots of experimenting to do in the coming few weeks!

[In2Photos]

So if it creates an image file rather than simply copying each file on the drive, would I then use DriveImage to extract the image file to a new hard drive if it ever needed to be replaced? Sounds like I have lots of experimenting to do in the coming few weeks!
This is the same thing that Acronis does. I have no idea why it won't run on your machine. I have used it on an XP Pro machine and now my Vista 64 machine without any problems.

[gcflora]

So if it creates an image file rather than simply copying each file on the drive, would I then use DriveImage to extract the image file to a new hard drive if it ever needed to be replaced? Sounds like I have lots of experimenting to do in the coming few weeks!
That's exactly what you'd do. I also use it for quickly reinstalling Windows (i.e. it takes 5 minutes or so to reinstall instead of the tedious install process. The image is activated as well.

Edit: In2Photos, yeah it's the same as Ghost or Acronis. I just have my BartPE boot CD with DriveImage XML installed on it and my hard drive images/backups on an external hard drive so they're handy if I want to reinstall/recover from disaster. I don't use it as a replacement for proper backups of my data files; i.e. my important stuff (photos!) are backed up using traditional backup software and methods).

[gcflora]

Just boot of a Linux live cd like Ubuntu or Knoppix. Mount your internal and external drives and do a cp -R <internal> <external>.

You can probably dd the drives, as well, and it may even be faster with regards to I/O.

I'd actually do cp -a (which is actually cp -dpR) so symlinks and permissions etc are preserved. I know it'd make no difference using it on a FAT or NTFS partition, but may as well use cp -a all the time unless there's a reason not to :-)

Actually rsync is the better option in general. I use rsync (well, a script that uses rsync) as a cron job to perform incremental backups of my data server (which has an NTFS partition as well). man rsync ;-)

[gcflora]

I just found a thread that explains backing up with BartPE and DriveImage XML:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=236695

[gcflora]

Sorry for the nick change people (crobbins)