Mirroring/Backing up hard drive

[Bullet Days]

hi guys, i'm not sure where to post my question so i'll post it here where i do most of my inquiries.

so, i'm almost finished installing all my programs (sonar, project 5, some native instruments...). i have a spare hard drive, a barracuda ata with 80 gigs, that i'd like to use as my "ultimate" backup. basically, i'd like to take my c: drive and mirror it to that spare drive, which then i'd convert into an external drive with one of those conversion kits. i'm hoping that the spare drive will contain the operating system and be bootable as well, but if not then at least i'd like all my recording software transfered over "file folder for file folder." in an event of a crash, then all i'd do is plug the spare and transfer the data.

or am i asking for too much?

[Qwerty]

Get yourself a copy of Norton/Symantec's 'Ghost'. This will make a compressed bit-for-bit image of your hard drives entire contents.

If it ever breaks down, you simply blat the image back over the top and the problem is solved.

The trouble with just doing a straight copy is hidden files and system files. There will not be inherited correctly just doing a straight copy and paste to the other drive.

Q.

[Porter]

Bullet,

Q's method takes an image of the HDD (ps. Q, I didn't know you still 'sold that stuff' ;-) ). It will not be bootable.

This is what I have done. When I got my new computer I got a couple of HDD's. I installed XP on a 12GB partition and took an image of it using Ghost and put it on my other (Data) drive. After I had patched it I took another image and then after I have installed all my programs I took another image. Now the complete install of XP came down to about a 700MB file, each additional file was larger.. I think the largest about 1.5GB.

Not that I have all those images, the way I've set up Windows XP is so that the My Documents folder points to my data drive and I ONLY save data to the data drive. I run an incremental back up on that drive to another drive so I always have a restore to go from that drive. Now whenever my computer get's too much junk on it, or if I were to have a corrupt partition or something irriversable happens to windows, the only thing I would loose would be my favourites (unless I could boot to dos and copy them across)... I'd just use ghost again and pop the image back onto that partition and everything is up and running. Time to re-build PC... 6 minutes.

Just a suggestion/look at what I have set up,

Porter

[wang191]

tweak UI which is available on windows website via winxp power toys will let you save your favorits to any drive you want along with almost every other special folder.

[Bullet Days]

porter, i think i have a good picture of what you're talking about. problem is, my c: is not partitioned like yours, so i can't separate windows xp from my other programs. like i mentioned before, i basically want to take all my other programs, hidden files included, and mirror them into my spare drive.

how about window's "backup?" i'm assuming it's pretty much like a mirroring program. i guess what i can do is just backup the entire c:, or if it lets me, backup everything except for XP. i'm just worried about not getting those pesky hidden files. i'm planning on transferring (or maybe the word is "transfusing") the mirrored data into a laptop, and i'll be royally pissed if the programs don't work because it didn't copy those hidden files.

[Porter]

Originally Posted by Bullet Days

porter, i think i have a good picture of what you're talking about. problem is, my c: is not partitioned like yours, so i can't separate windows xp from my other programs. like i mentioned before, i basically want to take all my other programs, hidden files included, and mirror them into my spare drive.

how about window's "backup?" i'm assuming it's pretty much like a mirroring program. i guess what i can do is just backup the entire c:, or if it lets me, backup everything except for XP. i'm just worried about not getting those pesky hidden files. i'm planning on transferring (or maybe the word is "transfusing") the mirrored data into a laptop, and i'll be royally pissed if the programs don't work because it didn't copy those hidden files.

Ok, Ghost will allow you to take a complete image of you HDD.. also if you do my method, after taking an image, what you can do is then bring the image back and specify the size of the partition you want to work with. Now when I say it will take a complete image of your HDD it's at that point in time.. ie it isn't updated. To Mirror the drive, other than mirroring, I don't know if there is a way around it. Backup will take a copy of all data etc, it's not really a mirroring program, it's a I overwrote a file, let's restore it, or the registry is corrupted, let's restore it.

Now when you are referring to 'transferring' the mirrored data are you referring to XP by itself? If so that is another can of worms with drivers and everything.. I've got away with it once between two totally different systems, however rebuild soon after.

So what/why are you trying to do exactly with the 'ultimate back up'? Wouldn't you be better off installing the program on both your desktop and laptop and just saving data on a common HDD? mind you then you could have issues with Disk I/O speed.

Porter

[Porter]

BTW, thanks for that link wang...

Porter