Hard drive, file mirror help

[alidan]

this is my third hard drive failure in 3 months,

i have been keeping up a manual raid, copying many new files over between the hard drives for the last 3 months, usually once a month. now i lost 3 weeks of data, and have decided manually copying files is ineffective, and i need an automatic solution.

i want something that will do this every day at a specific time if i so chose, this way it prevents big downloads of gb's each from copying partially.

i would love for an easy solution, but that probably wont happen. so i want one that i can trust.

im planning on cloning the c drive with seatools, that way if the c drive or the soon to be new f drive fails, i can replace it with little work and have a bootable working solution, and have some amount of data security.

anyone able to suggest something?

 

[sminlal]

What version of Windows are you using? Windows 7 and, I believe Vista, include backup utilities than can be scheduled to run automatically.

 

[alidan]

xp home

 

[sminlal]

Ah, well AFAIK XP home doesn't include a backup program, so you'll have to look for a third-party alternative. When I used XP I used NTBackup, but that's only included in Professional, and I never scheduled it to run automatically.

 

[Paperdoc]

A clone is a way to make a complete HDD backup, all right. But Seatools won't do that job - it is Seagate's diagnostic utility. Instead (assuming you have all Seagate HDD units) get their utility called Disk Wizard. It only will make a clone TO a Seagate HDD - that's why I said all your HDD's need to be Seagate for this to work. BUT this still means you have to run the cloning software yourself - you can't scedule it to be fully automatic the way a good backup system works. However, the Disk Wizard clone process will make a COMPLETE clone in one operation you can start and leave to run.

 

[alidan]

im seeing about getting a western digital 1.5tb drive, in the hopes that all this will end when i do, but from what i understand seatools wil close any hard drive, but it will only clone to another seagate drive.

like my western digital drive will be main and ill close bi weekly to a Seagate drive. im thinking this is the best way to go because wd right now is worlds better than seagate, and if god forbid, my wd drive craps out ill only have lost at most 2 weeks of data, and ill have a contingency plan of haveing 2 seagate drives.

i hate that this is what it has come to, but i dont see much if any other options at this point.

 

[Paperdoc]

Ah, if you're going to have both Seagate and WD drives, you can still do the clone method, but with a twist. Seagate's Disk Wizard will make a clone copy TO a Seagate drive. Then you have to figure out how to get that cloned back to a WD drive, right? Well, WD also will let you download for free a utility they call Acronis True Image WD Edition that will do that latter job. And here's the fun part: BOTH appear to be customized versions of a third-party product, Acronis True Image. So if you can use one, you can learn to use the other really quickly!