HARD DRIVE CLONING?

I have had more computer problems in the last year that ever. Not good at backups, but trying to get better. Had one of my raid drives go down last week. Had all pics backed up. So I went to a single drive this time. A little slower, but I want to clone the drive so if it goes down I don't have to start over(installing everything). Will have 3 drives in the machine and one out(usb). File backup out side and on one inside. Clone on one by itself inside. Any other advice and which software? Have looked at norton ghost 12 and a few others nad not sure which to use?? Looking for suggestions.
Thanks!!

i know it's not what you asked but for recovery i used Runtime GetDataBack and it worked great. Got all my pictures back after an accidental format.

I would just buy an external USB drive and set it to backup your drive each night.

D.C. wrote in post #3544671
Had one of my raid drives go down last week. Had all pics backed up.

Well it doesn't look like a RAID to me. If you had one drive failure in a raid system, then just replace it and rebuild your RAID, no down time at all. What ype of RAID do you have?

Back to your question... I use ghost at work and it is really good! I recently rebuild 2 machines, drive to drive. 20 Gig took about 20 minutes.
HTH

Olyst wrote in post #3544693
Well it doesn't look like a RAID to me. If you had one drive failure in a raid system, then just replace it and rebuild your RAID, no down time at all. What ype of RAID do you have?

Back to your question... I use ghost at work and it is really good! I recently rebuild 2 machines, drive to drive. 20 Gig took about 20 minutes.
HTH

Raid 0 is not redundant or fault-tolerant it writes to multiple drives at once for faster performance.

you're right, RAID 0 or striping is for performance. RAID 1 is for redundancy, and then there's combinations which I've never had the balls to mess with like 0+1 and 5

It was raid 0. Poor drives i guess. The one left over is trash as far as I am concerned. It was faster, BUT. Am Looking for a belt and suspenders . Would like not to have to reinstall everything if it happens again. Nothing lasts forever!

RAID 3 or 5 would be a good solution if he has 3 or more drives and his RAID controller supports it. 3 is suppose to be the minimum but I usually prefer to have 4 drives for this type of setup to ensure no data loss if one drives goes out.

could you break that down for us cowboy?

Basically (in simple terms) with 3 or 5 if one drive goes out the system will continue to work normally and you can replace the drive and rebuild the information that was on it from the other drives. Here are 2 links that explain it better then I am able to.

http://www.acnc.com/04​_01_03.html

http://www.acnc.com/04​_01_05.html

you have a whole load of options.

To back up your install or clone your drive, as has been mentioned there's norton ghost, I've also seen, i think it's called EZ clone.

For the data, there's a free microsoft app called synctoy that is fantastic. It can be configured to push and/or pull data, with options on deleted files. it can also be set up to run as a scheduled task.

Have you considered a NAS (Network Access Storage) setup, plug a linksys NSLU2 into your router and hang 2 usb drives off it. you can then access the data on the drives from any pc on your network, and use synctoy to either copy files from your pc to one of the drives or copy files between drives.

never heard of that synctoy, I'll have to check that out.

Thanks for the synctoy heads up. Will be trying that for the data backup. Looks like it will sync between the 2 drives(great). Will maybe try Norton ghost for the clone. Not sure about that one. I knew there would be some good ideas here. Thanks again.

INcowboy wrote in post #3544704
Raid 0 is not redundant or fault-tolerant it writes to multiple drives at once for faster performance.

Of course, I always forgot about JBOD. I'm always used to talk about RAID, meaning RAID5.

INcowboy wrote in post #3544743
3 is suppose to be the minimum but I usually prefer to have 4 drives for this type of setup to ensure no data loss if one drives goes out.

What do mean by 'setup' ? RAID3 or 5 ?