Spec me a disk cloning prog

joeyjojo · 3 Aug 2009 at 18:13

I'm looking for a backup/cloning tool.

I used to have two hdd's in a RAID1 mirror, and I am now more or less looking for a purely software (vista) based tool to achieve the same thing. The reason for this is to keep both HDD's bootable (ie. not backing up to zip/archives etc.)

As a bonus I would like to only write to the mirror periodically, say once per day. In this way there would be no performance hit due to constantly writing to both drives. All the actual copying could go on at a later time.

Is there anything that can actually do this? Thanks!

joeyjojo · 4 Aug 2009 at 19:02

Any advice?

Sin_Chase · 4 Aug 2009 at 19:04

Software raid sucks, avoid.

PLENTY of Disk Imaging software out there, there are limitations though.

Hot imaging of a live drive will cost you. If you are willing to do this cold every time it is needed then your options are much better.

joeyjojo · 4 Aug 2009 at 19:23

Right, I want to avoid 2 things - hot imaging, and imaging the entire drive every time. It's a 750 gig drive, so to clone the whole thing every time is ridiculous as only a small percentage of files change each day.

Ideally there is a program which tracks the changes I make to files, and updates the mirror later on when I'm done eg. at night.

I had a look at synctoy, but to analyse the entire drive takes a looong time.

Sin_Chase · 4 Aug 2009 at 20:23

Just use hardware raid and be done with it?

joeyjojo · 15 Aug 2009 at 12:04

For the record - I've settled with doing full clones from time to time, and have synctoy set to do my most frequently modified data nightly with task manager. Perfect.

5abr3 · 15 Aug 2009 at 12:16

Paragon is the one I use (though rarely), as it clones entire paritions & files rather than individual files/fodlers.

ChileanLlama · 15 Aug 2009 at 12:41

I used to use Retrospect to "echo", but it had some problems with the NAS FS I was using so I binned it.

I find Synctoy is simpler and does what I need. There's also a RichCopy which was a GUI front end for XCopy written by an MS developer for internal use. It gives you more options than Synctoy and allows you to specify the number of concurrent copies etc. You should be able to find this on the MS Technet site

For a full clone I'd recommend Acronis True Image.