PookyNMR wrote on Fri, 05 May 2006 19:55 |
danlavry wrote on Fri, 05 May 2006 12:22 | I would really like to have a couple of extra hard drives or even a couple of computer that will have a "mirror picture" of the hard drives I use, so that I can just "pick up and go" when the hard drive breaks down. I would be willing to "re match" the extra drives to the working drives as often as once a week. I have not yet figured out how to do it. It would think there must be an easy way to do it.
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On the Mac there is an application that will make a working 'clone' of your hard drive, Carbon Copy Cloner. On the PC, if I'm not mistaken, Norton's 'Ghost' will do the same thing.
I use CCC to clone my hard drives to protect against failures, thefts, etc.
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I looked it up and it is probably worth the price.
But the description says: you can duplicate a drive if on the same machine, but can not do so between separate machines.
I also saw a competing software "True Image". I suspect it has the same limitation.
They let you copy files and directories from one machine to the other, which is something I was doing 20 years ago with DOS, before Windows. But they do not seem to recommend copying the applications.
Well, it is somewhat understandable, with all those dll's, registration codes, NIC id's and what not... But that would be of value (at least to me) to be able to just keep going on a second machine. I understand that there may be some software registration issues.
The question is: how bullet proof is a duplicate on the same machine?
I assume that a separate duplicate hard drive is much safer then duplicating on the same drive. If one hard drive breaks down completely, chances are that the other separate drive will still work.
But I can see some cases (though rare) where both drive can be gone, such as a major power supply failure, stolen machine...
I guess the technology is there to transfer files and a bunch of data very fast. It is more sophisticated then it was (it knows what is "new data", it is faster then in the past...)
But having a second machine ready and perfectly compatible is not a push button solution yet, one needs to install the applications as if it were first time installation...
I would be happier to have everything ready to go, minus the software licenses, to be activated when you need to change machines.
Regards
Dan Lavry