Recomended software to mirror hardrive

[Llhweiir]

I have a 200 GB Western Digital drive currently installed in my system. It has a 5 GB recovery partion and a 195 GB partition for normal use. Today I bought a 250 GB Samsung drive which I plan to use as a backup-disc. I want to be able to make a mirror image of my WD-drive onto the Samsung drive.

Unfortunately, my system does not seem to support RAID, and therefore I guess I am forced to use software-based "mirroring", right? Now, which software would you recommend for the job???

[Bill]

Are you asking about a program that will do dynamic mirroring so that the 2 drives are always duplicates of each other or do you want an image of the C drive for backup and restore?

Bill

[Llhweiir]

Are you asking about a program that will do dynamic mirroring so that the 2 drives are always duplicates of each other or do you want an image of the C drive for backup and restore?

Bill

My first priority is a pgm that allows me to make an image of the C drive for backup and restore...  which also would allow me to use the superflous space to other not so important storage... but that said, a pgm that does dynamic mirroring would be nice...

[Bill]

One of the most popular iamging programs is Acronis.

Bill

[Chandler]

For full disk backups I use Acronis TrueImage.

If you're wanting copies of certain directories, SecondCopy is worth a look.

There is a hardware RAID-type device that is independent of the OS.  You just connect it to the SATA port on your motherboard and connect two disks to it and it will always write the same to both disks.  Maybe those are worth investigating?

[Llhweiir]

For full disk backups I use Acronis TrueImage.

If you're wanting copies of certain directories, SecondCopy is worth a look.

There is a hardware RAID-type device that is independent of the OS.  You just connect it to the SATA port on your motherboard and connect two disks to it and it will always write the same to both disks.  Maybe those are worth investigating?

That sounds perfect - you don't happen to know what that device is called or where I can buy one? I am having trouble finding such a device, and the store I usually shop from havn't heard about it...

[Buffalo2102]

I can't find anything that connects to the motherboard SATA port either, but there are similar devices that connect via USB, firewire, etc.

Example - http://www.circotech.com/eagle-d-series-external-usb-raid-0-cage-for-two-sata-hard-drives.html

With that one you also need to buy the hard drives but some come complete with drives.  LaCie do a couple but they start at 1.5TB capacity and that's probably too large and too expensive for your needs.

Buff

[Chandler]

http://www.arcoide.com/ezraid_3.5_dd4_baymount.php

[Llhweiir]

http://www.arcoide.com/ezraid_3.5_dd4_baymount.php

Wow! This seems to be one amazing piece of tech... This simply MUST be the easiest way to achive protection against HD-failure... A bit expensive though, but definitiley worth considering...