Mirror Harddrives

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Drummer4Life05

Drummer4Life05

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I know Bulls Hit has done this, but I can't remember what exactly it's called or what program to use.
I know that "ghosting" basically makes an image of the drive for you to burn to CD, or upload or something.
I have one 80GB drive, and I plan on buying another. I'll create 2 partitions on each drive, and they'll both mirror each other (is that what it's called?)...

Am I making sense? I can draw a diagram or something if needed...:p

Thanks,
Justin
 
I think you thinking of raid1. It's a PCI card that you hook up 2 hard drives and you can use only one but everything you do goes on both kinda thing.
 
Yeah you can use a Raid controller to do mirroring, or you can do it manually with Norton Ghost to create either a clone or an image from one drive/partition to another
 
The difference being that RAID 1 does it faster, in real time, whereas Ghost is a backup imaging utility, correct?
 
Bulls - What's the difference between a "clone" and an "image"?

Thanks,
Justin
 
Well, upon further research, it appears that I'll be needing a RAID1 array of drives.
But I want 2 partitions on each drive, mirroring each other in the RAID array...is this possible?

-Justin
 
Raid 1 gives you realtime mirroring between 2 drives. However you won't be able to keep your audio on its own drive - it will have to share with the OS & everything else.

Doing it manually with Ghost requires a bit more effort, but by putting 2 partitions on each drive you can keep your audio files seperate from the OS as well as having total data redundancy.

A clone is an identical bit by bit copy of a drive or partition. You typically clone your C: partition to a partition on the other drive because then it's bootable. If your first drive fries, just pull it and boot off the 2nd drive.

An image is more like a backup. To use the image, you need to use Ghost again to restore it. The advantage of an image is you can use on the fly compression to save space
 
Cool, thanks Bulls.

Looks like cloning is the best option for me. What program do you reccomend? Can it be done automatically on a schedule? Say, every morning at 1:00am??

Thanks,
Justin
 
There are a few ways of using Ghost, and you could probably schedule the backups, though I've never done that myself. The most reliable way of cloning I've found is to use their boot diskette, which is pretty manual obviously.

However what I did on my new DAW was install XP, Cakewalk, drivers, and other various utilities and when everything was still brand new I cloned the C partition to my other drive as a one off. I can go back to that any time should I need to and I know it has a nice clean registry. If I do a major reinstall, I'll create a new clone, but until then what's there is all I need.

My audio is on the 2nd drive, and every now and then I'll create Cakewalk bundle files and write them to the 1st drive, so I don't use Ghost much on a regular basis.

My 2 120GB Barracuda drives are setup like this
Drive 1: C partition 30 GB - XP, Cakewalk, other software etc.
D partition 90GB audio backup
Drive 2: E partition 30GB clone of C partition
F partition 90GB audio

So both drives are bootable, with audio on its own drive
 
Thanks a lot Bulls Hit.
That's exactly what I was looking to do!!

Thanks for your help!!

-Justin
 
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