RAID backup software

[lharpf]

Hello guys,

I know IDE/SATA-RAID is so common these days that there has to be a good solution for this problem. I have two computers running RAID1 (mirroring) and want them to back up as much as possible of their contents to a third machine. I planned using Norton Ghost in the past, but it doesn't (officially) support RAID and the scheduling system was not up to scratch back then. Drive Image (or the latest Norton Ghost) should make scehduling easier, but still no RAID support.

So, what software would you recommend for this purpose? Windows XP is the current operating system, RAID controllers are HPT372 on the first machine, Sil 3112A on the other.

I'd prefer a system that enables you to just throw the backup to a new, blank HD and get back to work - Norton Ghost style. However, running a stop-gap system consisting of a BAT file with lots of XCOPY commands, I'm willing to consider pretty much anything.

 

[Winchester]

Acronis True Image supports RAID.

 

[cmv]

I don't see how RAID is important here. You have a partition with data. You want it backed up. Where does the fact you have RAID come in?

If you're backing up across the network, you owe it to yourself to investigate rsync. You can use this free tool instead of the (free also I think) robocopy from Microsoft to sync up data across a network. Rsync is smarter than Robocopy because when it detects a file has changed, it only copies the parts of the file that have changed and not the whole file. You can get rsync for Windows here:

http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.a...p/rsync/rsync_pc1.html

You can also install Cygwin but that is a bit invasive compared to the above. You might need to perform some more googling with "rsync windows" or similar if the above page is dated (it looks good for a start).

Update: I see where you're going with that last line. Maybe this is helpful, maybe not but I understand why you mentioned RAID now.