Mirroring HD to Partition

[ianbergman]

OK... does anyone know of a way to mirror, either in realtime or on a schedule, a hard drive to a partition on another drive?

Basically, I want to make an exact replica of my current hard drive, and keep it updated. So, I want an 80GB disk backed up to a 80GB partition on a 200GB disk. The reason I want a perfect mirror is I'd like to be able to restore an exact image of my drive. However, none of the software I've played with can do a mirror to a partition (only to another drive, and I don't want to waste a whole 200GB drive).

Requirements:
- either real-time mirroring with no/little performance loss, or ability to schedule
- exact mirror that I can either restore from an image file, or just start booting off of (no OS reinstall necessary)
- free/shareware software is nice, but I'll definitely look at commercial products as well if someone can point me in the right direction

Any ideas would be appreciated! WinXP's backup utility isn't doing it for me

 

[Bglad]

Raid is made to do exactly what you are asking but it is a redundancy solution not a backup solution because if you get an error or a virus, it will have been written to both drives.

The only real secure backup solution is a removeable disc that is pulled when not in use i.e. during backup.

I think DriveImage will allow you to schedule backups at a predetermined time. You could leave the backup drive in all the time or just put it in before each scheduled backup say Fri nights in the middle of the night or something.

Uh... just reread and saw you definitely want the backup on the same drive. Not a good way to do it because if your drive fails, your backup is gone too. But DriveImage definitely does it. I do it all the time to a second partition on my laptop. But I then boot to Windows and transfer the image to an external drive over the network for safekeeping.

 

[ianbergman]

Thanks for the suggestion of DriveImage -- I'll check it out; I think they even have a demo to download. What I'm doing is mirroring to a partition on a different drive; the problem is I'd like to be able to use the remaining 120GB of that drive, which I can't do if I go to a RAID setup. I know this isn't as secure as backup outside the machine, but redundancy is basically what i'm looking for.

But thanks, I'll look at DriveImage.

Can DriveImage work from within Windows (I can dream, can't I?), or do I have to boot to a CD or floppy to run it?

 

[Bglad]

DriveImage works from Windows for backing up when everything is working properly. But when you install it asks you to make a couple of boot floppies so that you can restore in the event windows gets corrupted. Then you can still boot from the floppies.

Ghost works only from floppies and is less reliable in my experience. Ghost tends to get errors in the image and you have to run a check of the image every time. If there is an error, it won't restore at all.

DI will restore even if there are errors, which it seems less succeptible to than Ghost. That way at least you can restore and get your files. Besides it is most likely that if there is an error, it will be someplace where you might not even notice.