Thread: Backup Software

I expect software that will clone my Cdrive to my support drive each week automatically. That way if my Cdrive fails I can only apply the other one right away. I have justdetected software that either produces a compressed support fileregularly or clones but does not let for a schedule. If anyoneexperiences software that will do this let me experience. By the way,it has to be free.

Doesn't run below Windows because it doesn't work from the OS itself. It has to be run after booting from it's CD or from another OS on another partition. That produces scheduling practically impossible. Unless you detect it acceptable to boot from Linux once a week, tell with Friday evening, and run the cloning program at 3:00 PM in the night through a schedule. But then you could only as well begin it manually earlier you go to bed, I think.

Instead of cloning, why not only do a full imaging? Programs such as Acronis True Image do have scheduling feature and will run below Windows applying the volume shadow copy service. Imaging would have at least two advantages above cloning. The first is that the disk space applied is only around 1/2 the size of the total disk spaced applied.

If you had 40 GB applied on a 200 GB disk, the image file would be about 20 GB or maybe less. The second advantage, and really might correct a disadvantage with cloning, is that you could keep multiple copies of your system. With cloning, if you had some corruption trouble with the original disk, it might be on the copy as well. With imaging, if you find or experience a corruption trouble, you could have various copies of your system to fall rear on.

What you might expect to look into is drive mirroring or a raid configuration. This is where you have 2 drives of the same size set up in your PC and they are automatically held in sync by either the operating system (software raid) or by a built in raid controller (hardware raid) on the motherboard.

Most decent motherboard these days have this ability built in or its well simple to set up in windows. You'll just have to do a small research and reading about adjusting up "raid" but its the best solution and once setup you don't have to do anything. Mind you its a good idea to always have a separate off site backup in case of theft,fire etc..

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