Using a Second Hard Drive as a Backup 1

[LawrenceC]

I cloned a hard drive onto a new, somewhat larger hard drive. It had a primary active partition and a smaller extended partition. I learned how to make the primary partition and the extended partition on the new drive and the cloning went fine, and I am now using the new drive. Now I would like to use the old drive as a back up. I thought I could just XXcopy newly generated files periodically from my new drive to the old drive, but now I am not sure. The old drive still has its primary partition active, and I don’t think I can have two drives each with an active partition going in a computer (is this correct?).

What should I do? This is my present plan: 1) erase and repartition the old drive, but do not make any partition active, and then format the old drive, 2) XXcopy or Ghost clone the present drive onto the old one, and then periodically update the old storage drive with XXcopy. If the new drive dies, I merely Fdisk and make active the old drive’s primary partition and either rejumper it or change the cable setting to replace the dead drive. Then I buy a new replacement drive and start the process over again, so I always have a second drive that is a clone of the first, or nearly so depending on when it was updated.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the best approach.

 

[LANmass]

It sounds like data integrity is of high importance to you. I would recommend going with a RAID 1 array for maximum protection. This would give you two hard drives with identical OS and program installations, and would protect against losing data in the event of a single HD failure. It would also drop your personal time in backing up data to zero.
You can find good RAID controllers for around $50 online.
Promise Fastrack66, Highpoint RocketRAID100 just to name a few.

 

[reub33]

I would use ghost to create an image (gho) file rather than cloning the second drive. as you said, if the first drive crashes you will need to change cables and jumper and make the drive active. By just creating an image file you will just have to install a new drive and restore the image file to the new drive. I use three drives on my system. Drive #1 is for the OS. Drive #2 for data files, Web browser cache file, downloaded internet files, etc. Drive #3 for files backup. I will create a new image file after i make a system change. Will wait about three days before creating new image to make sure that the system stays stable before replacing the image file. Will backup data files as needed with xcopy. I keep a download folder on #2 so after downloading a file I will run a virus check on that folder. I like keeping my web browser cache files on #2 so that i don't back them up when creating image file. Just a waste of space.....Good luck

 

[LawrenceC]

Thanks for suggesting this approach. It is a little more hardware oriented than I had hoped for - and I will have to learn about RAID!

Any other thoughts?

 

[LawrenceC]

Reply to Rueb33
This is an interesting approach. I have imaged my drive to CDs, but never restored the image to see if I did it right. It would be a major bummer to lose the hard drive and then get some error message when attempting to restore the drive from image files.

Perhaps I can test drive a process along the lines of your suggestion, to make sure I have it right.

Thanks for this suggestion. Three drives! Way careful! I suppose its faster.

 

[reub33]

It does make the backup/restore much faster. I'm not sure how the RAID card works but it seems to write to two drives at the same time. If that's the case and I install software that causes the system to become unstable I would not have a stable backup to restore since the second drive would have the same update as the first drive.