Is there a cheap or free prog that will mirror one disk to another on the fly or at least every hour

snow patrol

snow patrol

snow patrol

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Hi all.

So i was using carbon copy cloner on the mac which was great. Set a schedule and it automitically made sure the files/folders were copied from my primary photo usb disk to my back up disk. Never had a prob, always knew it'd work fine and keep the drives identical, and it was very cheap (under 30 quid i think).

I'm now on windows - i have shucked 2 4tb drives out of a mybook thunderbolt and put them in.

I'm looking for a program which will do the same but still keep the two disks separate. Or should i use raid/mirroring? I've had a quick play with that in disk management this evening but i'm not sure if i like how it works - seems to just create one disk? Also, it seemed to be stuck on resynchonising (although the disks are currently almost completely empty, save for some test files).

I found a program called AOMEI but to do scheduled backups of files/folders rather than just creating a disk image, it costs about 150 quid which seems rather steep.

any suggestions? many thanks!
 
easeus clone - used to clone my 2tb to 4tb hdd
minitool partition - used to change my 4tb hdd from mbr to gpt (the clone changed it from gpt to mbr, as the 2tb drive is mbr).

is this what you wanted to know?
 
bremen1874 said:
Are you after backup or redundancy?

If you're after redundancy then RAID1 (mirror) is the way to go.

For backups, there are many options.
Click to expand...

either really, but preferably a program such as carbon copy cloner but which doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I tried a few but they seemed to only backup to image files but i'd just prefer to have the files copied and updated to the backup drive every hour (or so) when the master drive has new files.

thanks
 
havenrl said:
easeus clone - used to clone my 2tb to 4tb hdd
minitool partition - used to change my 4tb hdd from mbr to gpt (the clone changed it from gpt to mbr, as the 2tb drive is mbr).

is this what you wanted to know?
Click to expand...

thanks - does this work as i need it, rather than just creating an image file? I'll give it a go though
 
d_brennen said:
Robocopy, set up a batch command to copy from sources /destination and run as a scheduled task
Click to expand...

thanks - im not going to lie...this looks a bit complicated as opposed to something with a nice simple interface etc. I know that's me being lazy but then again ive been a mac user for the last 10 years so forgive me ;) :D
 
snow patrol said:
thanks - im not going to lie...this looks a bit complicated as opposed to something with a nice simple interface etc. I know that's me being lazy but then again ive been a mac user for the last 10 years so forgive me ;) :D
Click to expand...

There are GUIs for Robocopy, Richcopy (project no longer worked on I believe) and EazyCopy. Never used either though, YMMV.

Robocopy isn't that hard to grasp really, worth looking into and useful to know
 
Unless there are physical constraints RAID1 is a better option. For a start, it'll be 100% up to date all of the time.

A mirror drive (RAID1 or otherwise) offers very limited protection. It may be nice to have, but only once there's a decent backup strategy in place.

Given two drives I'd rather have the second containing multiple backups instead of a single snapshot. That would help to protect you from accidental/malicious deletion, ransomware, etc.

For example, I use Macrium Reflect to take a full drive image every Sunday and a differential every other evening. That could easily be changed to daily and hourly if you wanted. You'd have multiple backup points that can be used to restore a single file or perform a quick and easy full drive restore.
 
bremen1874 said:
Unless there are physical constraints RAID1 is a better option. For a start, it'll be 100% up to date all of the time.

A mirror drive (RAID1 or otherwise) offers very limited protection. It may be nice to have, but only once there's a decent backup strategy in place.

Given two drives I'd rather have the second containing multiple backups instead of a single snapshot. That would help to protect you from accidental/malicious deletion, ransomware, etc.

For example, I use Macrium Reflect to take a full drive image every Sunday and a differential every other evening. That could easily be changed to daily and hourly if you wanted. You'd have multiple backup points that can be used to restore a single file or perform a quick and easy full drive restore.
Click to expand...

thanks - but if there are multiple copies on the second drive, wouldn't that drive need to have a much larger capacity than the source drive?
 
If you image the drive you can use compression. You're also only imaging the used portion of the drive.

The initial backup will be big. The differentials taken after that are likely to be small.

The size of the differentials will gradually increase. At some point, you need to take a new full backup which will reset the size of the differentials.

I use the paid version of Macrium because it can protect the backup images from deliberate or accidental damage/deletion. It also allows notification emails to be sent and supports incremental images (I still prefer differentials).
 
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