help! I need a program to make exact copy of a hard drive daily.

[gipper]

At my place of business, we just got four new workstations that I will be responsible for. They're all exactly the same. They're dell p4 2.0 with identical dual 80gb western digital hard drives. They do not have raid controllers, and in order to keep our IT support, I have to leave it EIDE so no extra raid controllers. I want to make an exact copy of the first drive to the second every time I shut down. Or at least just copy the changes. What software will let me do this? Been reading a little about Second Copy 2000, and that looks promising. When one hard drive dies, I want to be able to change the backup drive (slave) to primary and go right on. That will let me order a new hard drive and get it in in the mean time. Sorry about the length.

 

[larva]

Perhaps u can try Norton Ghost !

 

[gipper]

From what I read on symantec's website, ghost only goes hard drive to cdr.

 

[GeSuN]

Second Copy won't do the job. I'm using it just to make backup of files.

As for Ghost, it surely will do the job, cauz that's exactly what I'm doing on one computer at job. I have a batch file that is running after 5pm and that does the exact same copy.

With Ghost, you'll be able to swap the drives and boot with the slave...

 

[corkyg]

I do just about exactly what you want. Each system has two identical HDDs mounted in 5.25" external mobile racks. That gives each drive a cooling fan and an on/off switch. I can clone drive 1 to drive 2 or vice versa, and then by switch, rotate the drives so the last "duty" drive becomes the "reserve" drive. The software to do this is PowerQuest's DriveCopy 4.0. I have it on a bootable CDR. It doesn't care what OS you are using or what data formats. It handles FAT, FAT32, and NTFS and mixtures thereof with no problem. It takes about 25 minutes to completely clone a 40 GB drive. Changing from drive 1 to 2 or vice versa is the however long it takes to power down, turn two switches and reboot. Been doing this for at least 3 years now.

You can also use extra inner trays and have other drives with different operating systems and software. In fact, different users can thus have their own drive and lock it up when they are not using it. The mobile racks (all aluminum KF-21s) run about $28, and the spare trays about $19. HDDs are cheap. All in all, faster and cheaper than any tape-based backup system. Restoration is not needed.

 

[gipper]

So you're saying that I can set up Norton Ghost to make the second (slave) drive an exact copy of the first (primary) drive every time I shut down the pc. And that I could then remove the primary drive, switch the slave to primary, and boot from that drive. I would have all my files and programs available running off the second hard drive. Is this correct? It would essentially be like a raid 1 setup.

 

[gipper]

I know it's not raid 1, but I mean Ghost will serve that same purpose (drive mirroring) right.

 

[GeSuN]

So you're saying that I can set up Norton Ghost to make the second (slave) drive an exact copy of the first (primary) drive every time I shut down the pc. And that I could then remove the primary drive, switch the slave to primary, and boot from that drive. I would have all my files and programs available running off the second hard drive. Is this correct? It would essentially be like a raid 1 setup.


Yup exactly! And it works perfect!

 

[GeSuN]

I know it's not raid 1, but I mean Ghost will serve that same purpose (drive mirroring) right.

Yes it's not raid but it will do exactly the same thing... Like you said

 

[Rob G.]

The problem with using Ghost is that you'd need a way of automatically booting the machines into DOS, as this is where Ghost needs to run from.

DriveCopy would be a better option methinks.

 

[GeSuN]

The problem with using Ghost is that you'd need a way of automatically booting the machines into DOS, as this is where Ghost needs to run from.

I run the new version on both windows and DOS... But I have a couple of clients that absolutely needed to be in DOS to make the ghost so this is what I did,

in the task manager, after their working hour, i called a little program called reboot.exe wich does reboot the computer (duh!)

then the computer loads on the bootdisk i've created (wich was put in the computer by the client before they leave)

the bootdisk automatically loads ghost and make the backup.

Then it shuts down the computer with shutdown.exe (wich i did in assembler )

Monday morning when they come to work, they remove the bootdisk before starting the computer, then they have an exact copy of their HD on the second one.

 

[rudder]

Do you all not have a server? It seems the data is pretty important. Why not centralize that and back it up daily. Then you can just ghost the PCs and have a spare hard drive waiting. Keep your working data on a raid array on an daily backed up server.

If you do use ghost on a network make sure you set it to generate a new SID.

 

[GeSuN]

Do you all not have a server?

For a home user, having a second computer is something a too expensive solution... As for myself, yes we have a server at work, and yes we have a backup. But because client doesnt always have a server, we have to find other ways....

 

[gipper]

thanks for all the replies. We can't buy a server. We have four old machines going back as their lease expires at the end of the month. We are only allowed to replace pc's going back on lease at this time in my company. A server is out of the question. I was able to buy the pc's with dual identical hard drives, but in order to maintain IS support, I was not able to buy them with raid as an option. I need a way to mirror these hard drives in software. I can't believe that someone doesn't make a program that does exactly that seeing as how many people could obviously use it. (So if any of you programmers out there want to take a hint......) This is an open market as I see it. Great demand, no competition.

 

[GeSuN]

I need a way to mirror these hard drives in software. I can't believe that someone doesn't make a program that does exactly that seeing as how many people could obviously use it.


You obviously don't read the post dont you???

Ghost does exactly what your looking for!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Rob G.]

Drive Image 5.0 includes a feature that allows 'jobs' (i.e. backup) to be scheduled. When the time comes, the machine automatically reboots into DOS (no floppies required), does the work and then reboots back up again.

However, Drive Image creates images, not clones of the source drive. Drive Copy does do cloning but I don't know if it includes the same scheduling feature.

 

[rudder]

Well I would still recommend at least an add-on ide raid card. I mean what are the odds your drive will die right after the backup image is created. More than likey it will die during the day. With the raid card you will still be in business with no work lost. It does no good to ghost the drive and have the drive go bad at 4:58 p.m. You then lose a whole days worth of work.

 

[GeSuN]

Well I would still recommend at least an add-on ide raid card.

I would have recommended that too, but he said :

but in order to maintain IS support, I was not able to buy them with raid as an option.

That's why I recommended Ghost. I'm sure Drive Image would do the job too.

 

[rudder]

Yeh thats cool, but I would still spend the extra $30 for a raid IDE card and mirror the two drives. Doing the ghost thing is good, but you are only saving computer up time you are not doing anything to protect the data. Most of the places I have worked, if you lost a days worth of work it was worth a hell of a lot more than $30.

 

[GeSuN]

Doing the ghost thing is good, but you are only saving computer up time you are not doing anything to protect the data.

I'm not sure I'm following you... Ghost will do exactly the same as RAID 1 no?

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: GeSuN
Doing the ghost thing is good, but you are only saving computer up time you are not doing anything to protect the data.

I'm not sure I'm following you... Ghost will do exactly the same as RAID 1 no?

Raid 1 is mirroring the drive, much like ghost. But Raid 1 is instantaneous. If you create a new word document and save it, the save is duplicated on the other drive in the Raid 1 array. Where as ghost you have to stop what you are doing (for best results I'm sure) then spend 30 minutes copying the contents of 1 hard drive to another. So if you saved that word document on your non-raid drive, it would not get duplicated to the second drive until you ran ghost.

 

[GeSuN]

Raid 1 is mirroring the drive, much like ghost. But Raid 1 is instantaneous. If you create a new word document and save it, the save is duplicated on the other drive in the Raid 1 array. Where as ghost you have to stop what you are doing (for best results I'm sure) then spend 30 minutes copying the contents of 1 hard drive to another. So if you saved that word document on your non-raid drive, it would not get duplicated to the second drive until you ran ghost.

ok ok, i thaught you were saying that the results of a ghost wasnt the same as raid 1... Of course you have to wait for ghost to make the mirror, but at least you have one!