I have just installed another 80gb harddrive. It is now sat there with nothing on it. I want to use this as a backup. I want to be able to back up all the files on the hard drive which I am currently using onto this new one, to make a clone. Then if my current one fails, I can boot to the new one and there won't be any difference. Is there a free program which will let me weekly update the new hard drive to mirror the one I am using? If there are no free ones preferrabley a popular one which requires a serial code.. I don't know this forums views on using illegal serial codes. Thanks in advance.
Well, i don't know if there is a program that will let you do that. But heres what i do know: After you installed the new 80GB HDD, you must install XP on it if you want to be able to boot up into it. Once you've installed XP, boot up your old HDD and it should detect a "new hard disk" which you may utilize from your old hard drive! So now, just copy the files you want to back up into your new 80GB hard drive! If your old HDD fails, all you do is boot back to the new HDD and there you go! All your backed up files are there. Personally, i dont think you need a program to do this... just copy them yourself.
That won't boot up to windows though, to make a true 1:1 copy of everything you need to use a utility such as Norton Ghost - maybe someone here knows of a free version?
I don't understand when you say "that won't boot up to windows"... It is true that, once Windows is installed onto the 80GB HDD you MAY boot up the system. Or maybe i misunderstood you?
Oh sorry i must have skim-read that bit and missed it. But still it would be much much faster to ghost it than to install everything from scratch and then manually mover your files (Last time i used ghost on a small-scale drive to drive locally I did around 80gbs of data in about 30 mins)
Yeah its a pretty powerful tool, if you have access to the corporate version you can set up a 'ghost server' then ghost entire labs of computers all at once - kinda spooky to see em all installing at the same rate slowly over the network, most I ever did at once was around 60. Then all you gotta do is change all their names with a script according to IP.
I just upgraded my 60GB Fujitsu to a WD 120GB on our HP laptop. Flawless transfer of everything including XP. It is fully bootable and running just fine. What did I use you ask--Acronis TrueImage 8. I have not used Ghost, but have not had a problem with TI to get a drive set up. Keep in mind that you must always have a backup strategy for your data. TI offers several ways to "clone" and I always use the manual method so that I insure that the old drive retains everything. If you intend to use your new drive solely for backup work there are both free and $$ programs out there. Again TI offers that ability too. Unless you have a really unusual configuration most of these programs should work.
