Possible for two bootable HD's with mirroring?

[Arigato]

Is it possible to have TWO Bootable hard drives in which they mirror eachother?

Basically can i have two hard drives both which are bootable, but every morning around 1 am the second HD copies the first HD. So if anything happens to HD1 I can merely boot into Hd2 which would be a back up of everything up until the night before.

If so, how?!

 

[willard]

Depending on how I interpret your question, I could arrive at two answers.

1. You just want to make sure you don't lose your data in the event of a hardware failure. RAID-1 does exactly this, and you're not limited to nightly backups. Everything you do is written to both drives simultaneously.

2. You want a failsafe in case you get a virus or something that is not a hardware failure. In this case, there are countless automatic backup utilities out there that will backup your important data, or even whole disks. Just hit Google with "automatic backup" to peruse the different pieces of software at your leisure.

 

[Arigato]

Depending on how I interpret your question, I could arrive at two answers.

1. You just want to make sure you don't lose your data in the event of a hardware failure. RAID-1 does exactly this, and you're not limited to nightly backups. Everything you do is written to both drives simultaneously.

2. You want a failsafe in case you get a virus or something that is not a hardware failure. In this case, there are countless automatic backup utilities out there that will backup your important data, or even whole disks. Just hit Google with "automatic backup" to peruse the different pieces of software at your leisure.

Yes and no.

I want the drives to be identical, but in case of a virus..I want to merely be able to boot into the second hard drive and not lose time restoring with a back up. Is it possible to do that? That's why I added the "day behind". So if I get a virus that day..I can simply boot into the next HD and not lose time.

 

[willard]

Full drive cloning takes quite a bit of time (several hours), especially with larger drives. It's not really feasible to do that every day, even if you schedule it for the middle of the night. You also can't make a perfect copy of a drive while it's in use (things are constantly being written to it), so you can't do this from Windows as far as I know.

There are definitely utilities to clone a drive, but I'm not aware of any of them that will do so automatically on a schedule. It would be extremely invasive, requiring modifications to the boot loader so when it restarts the computer to clone, it boots into itself rather than windows and can make a proper clone. During this whole process your computer will be unusable, and stopping the process will destroy the backup on your target drive.

Simply doing a nightly backup to an external drive is probably a better idea. Recovery wouldn't be as fast as with a clone, but actually making the backups is infinitely less painful, requires much less space and you can keep many backups at once, so you're not limited to only going back 24 hours.

 

[Shawn Vahid]

Responding to Arigato's question:

i had the same problem as yours and i found a very reliable backup software which is http://www.acronis.com/ .
This soft ware would take an image of your computer every day or depending how you schedule it.( remember it should be on a different hard drive). then in case of an emergency you can bring everything back the way i was before an computer problem or hard drive failure.


Good Luck!
shawn

 

[willard]

Please check the post date before posting. This thread has been dead for half a year.