Mirroring a Hard Drive - Questions

[Inno]

I've lost two hard drives in the past 6 months, getting things back to the way they were (installing apps and programs, settings etc.) is a royal pain in the butt and more time than I have to spare.
I was thinking about running mirrored hard drives or at least mirroring my working hard drive so that if something happened to it I could just pop in the other drive and it would already be set up with windows etc. and all my other apps.
Files would be stored on a separate drive so as not to lose them.

What program could I use and how might I set this up? I'm sure there are a few ways to do it.
I currently have 2 IDE drives of the same size (120GB) I intend to use for this purpose. Also what about mirroring the drives on a real time basis, in other words, having two identical drives which both store the same info. Is this a good idea? I'd like to hear opinions on both ways.
Thanks

 

[Ilya]

Mirroring is what you refer to as "real time mirroring". The other one is called "imaging" or "cloning", not "mirroring". Mirroring can be done in software (supported by Windows - no need to buy anything, just format the second drive as a mirror in the Disk Manager), or it can be done in hardware, using a RAID controller - that costs more money, but is much faster and more reliable than software mirroring. Mirroring is also known as RAID-1.

Imaging can be done with many different programs. Personally I use good old Norton Ghost (Now called SGSS, I believe). Perhaps not the best choice, but I am used to it.

 

[harshness]

Acronis makes a nifty package for imaging called True Image. It supports incremental and differential images so you don't have to re-image the entire drive all the time.

The reality is that you need to choose a different drive manufacturer and/or get some cool air into your boxes.

 

[navychop]

RAID has saved my butt at work many times. Go for the hw RAID solution.

 

[primestar31]

Casper 5.0 Casper hard disk copying software provides complete PC backup protection | Future Systems Solutions

Is the BEST disk cloner I've ever used. I've even been able to clone damaged drives at times, with a perfect bootable copy. It's superior to Acronis, (IMO) but it only does a clone to another drive, it does not make a backup image to cd's or dvd's, etc. Norton's Ghost usually will give up cloning if there's disk or file system damage, so I haven't used it for many years.

 

[John Kotches]

The problem with RAID or any real time mirroring tool is that if you have an "oops" moment, and we probably all have, it dutifully replicates that "oops" to the mirror. Online mirrors are designed to keep you from crashing in the event of a drive failure, they don't protect you from "oops".

Depending on the needs of the user, an offline mirror replicated on a regular basis could well be a better solution than a live mirror.

 

[TheForce]

I've been using Ghost for my C drives on my 4 desktops, spare laptop hard drive, but I admit, I don't take the time to backup the ghost drives as often as I should. RAID Mirror would be a much wiser choice. When I hear the C drives begin to sing, it is my warning I need to update the Ghost drive. In the past that warning has saved me as the singing drive failure occurred within a month.

 

[JAG72]

I've been using Ghost for my C drives on my 4 desktops, spare laptop hard drive, but I admit, I don't take the time to backup the ghost drives as often as I should. RAID Mirror would be a much wiser choice. When I hear the C drives begin to sing, it is my warning I need to update the Ghost drive. In the past that warning has saved me as the singing drive failure occurred within a month.

The problem with RAID or any real time mirroring tool is that if you have an "oops" moment, and we probably all have, it dutifully replicates that "oops" to the mirror. Online mirrors are designed to keep you from crashing in the event of a drive failure, they don't protect you from "oops".

Depending on the needs of the user, an offline mirror replicated on a regular basis could well be a better solution than a live mirror.

This is why the best solution is a combination of mirroring and backups. The problem is that it is also the most costly, but it really depends on how valuable your data is to you.

 

[TheForce]

My video data is just too big to be using mirror and I risk the loss by having it only on one drive. Over the years I have lost a couple of projects but so far haven't had the need to reconstruct from the archived video tapes. I backup the edit scripts, however, as they are small files and have all the data needed to reconstruct complex edit decision lists. The C drive with installed software is what can take me days to reconstruct so the simple Ghost drive swap out is really a God send solution. My problem is getting around to ghosting the spare drive more often. Right now my last drives updates were done in April.