Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations IamaSherpa on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Backing up entire hard disk

Status
Not open for further replies.

Guest_imported

New member
Jan 1, 1970
0
I was surprised to discover that there was no easy solution to backing up an entire hard disk to another internal hard disk or to an external USB hard disk. I have two situations: 1) a laptop with an internal 25GB drive along with external USB 40GB hard drive. I wanted to use Ghost or something like it to make a complete copy of my internal drive (disk image?), but learned that Ghost does not support writing to external USB devices. 2) I have a desktop with two internal 20GB hard drives. I would like to make a complete copy of the master drive onto the second drive. Ghost could do it, but then I'd have to physically remove the drive from the machine, apparently due to it then having 2 operating systems.

My hope would be to be able to do this, and automate it so it can happen at a scheduled time, or at least make it very easy to do (1-click operation). Perhaps VBScript could work with a backup utitility to do this?

Are there any solutions anyone knows about where I can make a complete copy of the hard drives for these two situations?
I realize I can copy all the data, but I was hoping to copy everything so if is crashed, it would be easy to restore everything as it was. Thanks for any suggestions!
 
Partition Magic reckons it supports USB drives and its got a partition copy function. Cloning 1st disk to second does NOT mean you have to remove second disk. System should boot as normal (you're not changing boot sequence, so bios will boot same disk as now) - second disk will be visible in explorer etc. Might be a good idea to 'hide' the drive its on (tweakui has such a facility) so you can't accidentally update it (or set it to read only). Hope this helps.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top