Any good drive live-mirroring software for non-RAID?

[Lonyo]

I am planning for a NAS and backup box, where speed won't be an issue, so none of the benefits of RAID give me any incentive to use it so I'd rather not mess with it and have any complications if I want to change drives around.

Looking for something to back up drives as things are copied over onto a second HDD but without them being in RAID.
This would be in a non-critical system for general backups and I don't feel a need for RAID since I want it to be flexible, and have the ability to remove a "backup" drive and stick it in another machine if I ever want it.

OS will run on a separate SSD and drives will be mechanicals for storage/backup only.
Probably going to run Windows (7) but could run Linux if there's nothing available for Windows and I can get it to play nice with a bunch of Windows computers.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

what os? (windows/linux?)

 

[Lonyo]

what os? (windows/linux?)

Forgot that part. Windows.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Windows has a built in RAID1 (mirroring) that ought to work.

I've set it up before: the partitions have to be the same size, but the disks don't. You can remove a (1) disk, install it in another system, and it will show up as a degraded mirror. Reads/writes/deletes all happen to both drives at the same time.

A more elegant (?) solution may be something like SugarSync, which allows you to auto-sync folders. This also gives you the option of integrating cloud backups as well.

 

[Lonyo]

Windows has a built in RAID1 (mirroring) that ought to work.

I've set it up before: the partitions have to be the same size, but the disks don't. You can remove a (1) disk, install it in another system, and it will show up as a degraded mirror. Reads/writes/deletes all happen to both drives at the same time.

A more elegant (?) solution may be something like SugarSync, which allows you to auto-sync folders. This also gives you the option of integrating cloud backups as well.

Well... after all the time I've spent in Disk Management, I've never noticed that option before, so that makes it rather simple. Problem solved.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I know you said no RAID, but software RAID "fixes" a lot of the array-portability issues and so forth.

I also prefer to use a system's built-in tools when possible.

If you didn't need immediate mirroring, you could just use robocopy on, like, a 10 minute timer or something. Set it not to delete things (only copy new data) and you'd have a sort of backup too.

 

[Phynaz]

If you just need the files and not the image, use Crashplan. It will backup on file system to another.

 

[Essence_of_War]

http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/compare.html

All versions of SyncBack let you schedule backups so that you can get regular checkpoints.

But it sounds like what you really want is waht dave_the_nerd suggested.