So I have A LOT of very important data and over the years I've had to purchase new drives as I ran out of space naturally. Now I have a total of 5 drives and I've been pulling my hair out over this for a few years now, trying to figure out how exactly I could do this.
This is what my system looks like as far as hard drives go:
Figured an image would be better than trying to write out every drive, easier for everyone else.
So a couple of these drives have an OS installed on them (I would install windows onto one drive, run out of space then had to purchase new drives and do that again but now I just run off of the main SSD drive's OS then add HDDs to store data.
And I would like to just back everything up, all the drives including the OSes, pretty much like a clone of all the drives so in case one drive fails I can be back up and running again without having to reinstall a new OS and try to configure it how it was before with settings and whatnot that I spent so much time doing in the past, installing drivers and doing registry edits for specific programs and files, etc.
I just don't want to be installing an OS again, I want to back everything up so I have a mirror image clone of each drive so if I need to recover a drive that failed all I have to do is buy a new drive and move the backup to it and I don't have to worry about installing a new OS or any of that.
The drives total about 3.5 TB so I have a 4 TB drive that I'd like to backup all the drives to. I'd like to just copy all the system files and data for each drive, each partition to the 4 TB drive then if one of the drives fails I can just recover that respective drive's backup partitions on to a fresh drive without having to reinstall OS or anything like that.
I'm looking for a step by step solution for this challenge I'm facing including what backup product you would suggest doing it with (hopefully there's a free solution but I'll buy it if it will solve my problem and works properly)
I'm mainly leaning towards cloning as that seems to be the quickest method to just backup everything in its entirety which is what I'm looking for but I'm also constantly downloading more music, changes constantly made to my data and I have a whole lot of drives so cloning each drive one by one is going to be pretty painful doing that constantly. Would be great if there is some way I can backup the system AND data files for all of my drives and also be able to quickly update those already made backups. Also I'm really new to backing up data so I'm going to need to have this explained to me like I'm stupid so I can fully understand everything I'm doing - always avoided image backups as it seemed so tedious and technical, like it might take more time than cloning but that might be the route I may have to take.
I know this might be pretty complicated and it could get even more complicated and messy but I'm willing to send some sort of 'donation' to whoever can take the time to find a foolproof solution to this for me so I can just be done with this once and for all and have my valuable data finally backed up!
This is what my system looks like as far as hard drives go:
Figured an image would be better than trying to write out every drive, easier for everyone else.
So a couple of these drives have an OS installed on them (I would install windows onto one drive, run out of space then had to purchase new drives and do that again but now I just run off of the main SSD drive's OS then add HDDs to store data.
And I would like to just back everything up, all the drives including the OSes, pretty much like a clone of all the drives so in case one drive fails I can be back up and running again without having to reinstall a new OS and try to configure it how it was before with settings and whatnot that I spent so much time doing in the past, installing drivers and doing registry edits for specific programs and files, etc.
I just don't want to be installing an OS again, I want to back everything up so I have a mirror image clone of each drive so if I need to recover a drive that failed all I have to do is buy a new drive and move the backup to it and I don't have to worry about installing a new OS or any of that.
The drives total about 3.5 TB so I have a 4 TB drive that I'd like to backup all the drives to. I'd like to just copy all the system files and data for each drive, each partition to the 4 TB drive then if one of the drives fails I can just recover that respective drive's backup partitions on to a fresh drive without having to reinstall OS or anything like that.
I'm looking for a step by step solution for this challenge I'm facing including what backup product you would suggest doing it with (hopefully there's a free solution but I'll buy it if it will solve my problem and works properly)
I'm mainly leaning towards cloning as that seems to be the quickest method to just backup everything in its entirety which is what I'm looking for but I'm also constantly downloading more music, changes constantly made to my data and I have a whole lot of drives so cloning each drive one by one is going to be pretty painful doing that constantly. Would be great if there is some way I can backup the system AND data files for all of my drives and also be able to quickly update those already made backups. Also I'm really new to backing up data so I'm going to need to have this explained to me like I'm stupid so I can fully understand everything I'm doing - always avoided image backups as it seemed so tedious and technical, like it might take more time than cloning but that might be the route I may have to take.
I know this might be pretty complicated and it could get even more complicated and messy but I'm willing to send some sort of 'donation' to whoever can take the time to find a foolproof solution to this for me so I can just be done with this once and for all and have my valuable data finally backed up!
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