Mirror a drive via usb2 or fire wire

javan_singh · 14th February 2006

Mirror a drive via usb2 or fire wire
on windows 2003 server any any one been able to do this ?

philb · 16th February 2006

Get yourself something like True Image and just save snapshots to your external drive. You're going to be hard pushed to get live mirroring that works properly.

Jon-NC · 16th February 2006

The new norton ghost can create images on the fly but you're going to have to purchase the corporate version for 2003. Not used True Image but it looks good.

Have you considered backing up files to an offsite provider instead?

dch · 16th February 2006

This was mentioned by somebody else on this forum before, I can remember who offhand - but recently have tried it and it is excellent - DriveSnapShot - and only costs around £60 for a server license - it is just very simple with no bloat what-so-ever.

Cheers

javan_singh · 17th February 2006

thanks will give them all a try

jamster · 17th February 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by dch

This was mentioned by somebody else on this forum before, I can remember who offhand - but recently have tried it and it is excellent - DriveSnapShot - and only costs around £60 for a server license - it is just very simple with no bloat what-so-ever.

Cheers

Yep that was me. Like the other solutions though, it won't just duplicate the drive - it will make image files of the partitions you ask it to.

If that's all you need then great (it would allow you to easily restore these images back to a hard drive - a tip would be to make the external USB hard drive bootable with something like BartPE which you can include the snapshot program on in order to restore to the internal drive very quickly in case of a crash).

If you need to clone the disk and have it as an exact copy (byte for byte) you'd probably have to reboot and use another tool (like the very many linux rescue disks out there - and use the dd command) but I'm not sure if there are any tools that let you do it from within Windows (there may be - haven't looked).

dch · 17th February 2006

I'll just take this opportunity to thank you Jamster for posting this before!
(and welcome any more gems like this

Cheers.

philb · 18th February 2006

True Image dumps byte for byte images of the occupied parts of partitions at the time of the snapshot. If you've got stuff in RAM that hasnt been flushed to disk, then you're going to obviously be missing that data.

It's pretty rare anyone wants or needs a full "clone" of a disk, other than from a forensic computing standpoint (experiment with the clone, not the original!).

Images are more than adequate from a disaster recovery perspective.