Cloning an external hard drive

[chrisbirley]

I was a little unsure as to whether this is the correct place to put this but I thought this was as good a place as any.

A customer of mine has two external USB hard drives. He has data on one and wants us to 'clone'/ copy the data from one to the other and remove the spare as a backup. The other problem is that there are long filenames included which gives explorer grief!

I have looked into cloning tools, but the majority of them seem to need a reboot to clone the disc, which would not be too bad if it was just going to be about 5 mins downtime, but for a 200GB drive I doubt it. What I am after is some software that can clone the data without having to reboot the server.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

Chris

 

[westredd]

you could use some software called total commander. its very useful for copying large amounts fo data from a to b. if it comes across a long filename, it will tell you it couldnt copy the file and ask you if you want to continue copying the rest. at the end, it will show you a list of what it couldnt copy.. Usually I zip those problem folders up and copy the .zip. At least they still have it as a backup.

Other than that yuo could use winrar (similar to winzip but alot better) to compress everything to the other drive and splilt it into 50mb files., then after u can use a program called smartpar to make a parity file in case anyone of the archive files gets corrupted. the parity file can rebuld any one of the files that gets corrupted. (should it happen)

 

[bcastner]

http://www.xxcopy.com/#toc

http://www.syncback.com/

Either. No reboot required. Long filename support in both instances.

Commercial alternatives:

Norton Ghost 9.0 -- do not accept earlier versions
Acronis True Image