Copy Image or Clone

[grarcher]

Given my recent questioning about mirror drives and HDD cloning what is best option to just store data.
Clone a disc copy a disc or a disc image.
Would you add an extra drive and just use windows copy *.* from disc D: to E: or clone it given that its not the boot drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Given my recent questioning about mirror drives and HDD cloning what is best option to just store data.
Clone a disc copy a disc or a disc image.
Would you add an extra drive and just use windows copy *.* from disc D: to E: or clone it given that its not the boot drive.

For a secondary drive, either way works.

Clone, or just copy/paste from one to the other.
After, swap drive letters around.

If you copy/paste, do NOT try to do the whole drive at once. Do it piece by piece...1 top level folder, then the next.
Why? If it fails, you'll have a much better concept of where to start again.
If you select the whole drive, and there is a power interruption or other fail, you have no idea of exactly what was copied and what wasn't.

And copy/paste, not move.

 

[Solandri]

A clone will create an exact duplicate of the original drive - files, partitions, layout, and all. Generally you only need to do this for boot drives, where idiosyncrasies of bootstrap layout may make a difference. One peculiarity is that if you clone a 1 TB drive to a larger drive, it will be set up as a 1 TB drive. You will have to manually expand the partition(s) to use the rest of the empty space (some cloning software will do this automatically).

An image is a backup. It converts a partition (sometimes multiple partitions) into a file which holds the contents of that partition. This is not what you want unless you want a manageable (immutable) backup. Depending on the image creation program, certain files (e.g. OS or temporary files) may be excluded from the image.

Since you're just talking about data files, copying a disk is probably what you want. But be careful to set certain flags so you don't miss hidden/protected files, and be sure to use the verify option to make sure copies are clean. The Windows copy command is not very good for this because it dates back to the DOS days. Xcopy is probably better, but is still a command line tool.

Instead, you may want to look at GUI copiers. I personally use TeraCopy 2.3, but it's got a few bugs and I don't recommend the 3.0 version. One advantage of these is that they're pretty good about skipping files you've already copied (if you enable the verify step, they will check previously-copied files to verify they're a clean copy of the original - important because the file which was being written at the time of the failure can sometimes exist as a partial copy). So you don't have to worry about the failure problem USAFRet mentioned.

http://www.topbestalternatives.com/supercopier/

And yeah, copy first. Manually delete later after you're satisfied the copy was done cleanly.

 

[Dugimodo]

Robocopy is even better - let's you mirror a directory or drive etc and is much faster after the initial backup as it's only copying what's changed
The best way is to write a batch file then schedule it to run regularly in windows scheduler. I do this for a weekly backup of my NAS to a local hard drive.
there are graphical front end's for robocopy around but I prefer the batch file method.

More detail here or google is your friend http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/187346-robocopy-create-backup-script.html

Here's an excerpt

Code:

robocopy E:\Data1 G:\Backups\Data1 /e /mir /np /log:backup_log.txt
robocopy F:\Data2 G:\Backups\Data2 /e /mir /np /log+:backup_log.txt
robocopy F:\Data3 Q:\Backups\Data3 /e /mir /np /log+:backup_log.txt
pause

Where:
/e = copy all sub-folders, even empty ones
/mir = mirror (check the files in the destination, and only copy newer files)
/np = no progress counter
/log: = create a logfile

 

[grarcher]

OK so I need to clone a boot drive but can copy a data drive, given this then can you clone a server 2003 boot drive whilst the machine is still up & running?
Down time takes out the entire company for the cloning period so least down time is important.

 

[USAFRet]

OK so I need to clone a boot drive but can copy a data drive, given this then can you clone a server 2003 boot drive whilst the machine is still up & running?
Down time takes out the entire company for the cloning period so least down time is important.

Probably.
But such an action should be done in the hours of least use.
And then you will have some period of down time to actually physically switch boxes and connections.

And as always, have a viable backup. Just in case.

 

[Dugimodo]

Clone - creates an exact copy on another drive that can then be swapped with the original
Image - creates a single file backup of a drive or partition that can be stored and used later to restore another drive to that state

Either method can be used to back up a boot drive depending on how you want to store the backup and wether you want to keep a whole spare drive just for that purpose. Both methods can be done from a running OS but that method is less reliable than taking the system down and booting from an imaging/cloning tool disk.

Both Clones and images work best when restored to Identically sized drives, although in theory this is not necessary.

Just backing up data is a simple copying exercise using one of the methods suggested already.