Larry Koen :
Is is possible to duplicate an entire harddrive to another including programs and operating system if the harddrive is the same year make and model? The outcome I am looking for is to use that harddrive in case of a failure of the original drive.
Our entire church records and files, weekly service and music is run by this computer, a failure without a drive to swap and use would be extremly limiting. Can it be done?
While it's literally possible to clone the entire drive to another as a backup, from your description that's probably not what you want to do.
If it's crucial that this system be running and available all the time (i.e. there can be no downtime), then you want to look into making a RAID-1 system drive. RAID-1 uses two drives with the same content. If you write a file, the computer writes it to both drives simultaneously. If one of the drives should fail, the computer automatically switches to the remaining drive. You can then buy a replacement drive, install it, and the computer will duplicate the remaining good drive onto the new drive, thus restoring the redundancy. Drawback is cost, increased complexity when installing (you may have to manually install RAID drivers during the install process), and in some cases increased complexity of recovery in case of catastrophic failure (e.g. if both drives go bad, you cannot just pop in a Windows install disk to run the automated repair). Be forewarned that RAID is just to prevent downtime - you still need to back it up.
If you just want a backup (i.e. a little downtime is OK in case of system failure), look into backup tools like Easeus ToDo, Macrium Reflect, and Paragon Backup and Recovery. Make sure you create the recovery boot CD that comes with those tools. Then:
■ Add another HDD to the computer, slightly bigger than the existing one. (Or a lot bigger. The bigger it is, the more interim backup copies you can keep.) I'd recommend at least 2x as big. This will be your backup drive.
■ Backup the entire original hard drive to a backup image on the backup drive. This is the recovery image you'll use if the original HDD should go kaputt. You'll replace the dead drive with a new drive, boot off the recovery CD, and restore this image to the new drive. Update this about once a month or once every few months (or after a major system change like new programs installed). The backup program will compress the image, so the backup image size will be slightly smaller than the amount of used space on the main HDD.
■ Create a scheduled incremental backup that backs up all your data files. This should run once a day or once a week depending on how often the computer is used. This is what you'll use to restore files which are accidentally deleted or become corrupted. If you do suffer a main HDD failure, this is the backup you'll use to update after restoring the above system backup image, so it has the latest data files. These can be restored without the recovery CD. Differential backups will work too, but incremental is best. Although not necessary, about once a week (if daily backups) or once a month (if weekly backups), run a full data backup again. Definitely do it at least once a year.
■ Buy an external HDD the size of the backup drive you installed in step 1. Once a week or once a month, clone the backup drive to this external drive. You could run a separate backup to it, but cloning tends to be a lot faster since it just reads data straight off the disk sequentially instead of tracking down where each and every file is. Store this drive off-site. i.e. Take it home with you. This is your backup in case the church burns down, although it can also be used if your backup drive from step 1 dies.
Cloning (duplicating) a drive will work too, but it's generally something you do only when you need to duplicate a disk (e.g. transferring the OS to a new, bigger HDD or a SSD). It's not really recommended as a backup tool because your "backup drive" gets overwritten each time you're cloning. If the system should fail during the cloning process, you'll have a non-functioning system, and you won't have a backup. With the backup procedures I've outlined above, you can retain multiple backup images (depending on size of the backup drive). So if the system fails while it's creating a new backup image, only the original HDD and most recent backup image would be lost. You can still recover from an earlier backup image. The backup programs I listed should also be capable of cloning a drive.
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