hard drive back up query

D

daithi

Registered User
Messages
159
Hi all I want to back up my hard drive (after a very close shave) onto an external HD I,however have no idea how to do this-I have googled but my poor little brain was fried by terms like partioning and ghost drives etc..I have managed to copy pictures and video onto a Seagate Freeagent external HD but would like to back up my entire HD in case of HD failure I would be very grateful for any info-of a non techie nature if possible!

Thanks all,

daithi
 
If you want to clone your hard disk so that you can swap the clone into your PC at any time and boot from it then the two drives will need to be compatible (e.g. both SATA or both PATA, both 3.5" or both 2.5" (usually for laptops) etc.) and the one that you are cloning to will generally need to be as big as or bigger than the original. Then you can clone from the main to the copy using a variety of free or commercial tools. However for continuously maintaining a redundant copy that you can fall back on if necessary you will need to continuously do incremental updating of the copy to keep it up to date with the main hard disk. Something like Acronis TrueImage or may be a good solution. Or maybe an initial cloning using the free version of or [broken link removed] or ddrescue (bundled with lots of bootable CD GNU/Linux distributions - an handy one being PartedMagic) etc. and then incremental updates using MS SyncToy. There are lots of possibilities and lots of free and commercial tools. Do a search for similar threads which have touched on this sort of issue.
 
get yourself a program called Synctoy from microsoft.com (Clubman mentions it above)

Right click on the Start Menu button in the bottom left and this will tell you how many partitions your drive is divided into....I'm guessing just the one and its called C:

Once you run Synctoy, you will need to tell it how you want to do backups. There are 5 different options. You pick a source drive (which is probably be C: and a destination drive (external drive - probably E: or F:) and save that setting. The first backup will take a while as it will copy over everything, but once this is done and the next time you run the program, it will only copy over changes since the last backup so it takes a few mins
 
tosullivan said:
get yourself a program called Synctoy from microsoft.com (Clubman mentions it above)

Right click on the Start Menu button in the bottom left and this will tell you how many partitions your drive is divided into....I'm guessing just the one and its called C:
Click to expand...
SyncToy alone will NOT create an identical cloned copy of a boot drive which is what the original poster wants to do - i.e. the copy created with SyncToy cannot be installed into the PC as a replacement for the original hard disk and the PC booted off it.

You will need to do some sort of drive imaging first as outlined above. Most of these work at the raw block/sector level. XXClone is slightly unusual in that it only works at this level for the boot sectors and then copies the rest (excluding some stuff that it considers redundant) at the filesystem level (thus defragging the disk as it copies which is nice).

To be honest I'm pretty sure that there are websites which cover this task in much greater detail that I have tried to do above. However I have successfully performed this task many times using some or all of the tools mentioned above (most recently here).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top