The Attack of the Clones
I’ve been having a lot of “fun” in the past few weeks with cloning a hard drive on a server. Let me tell you up front that I am a major penny pincher. You might remember my series on simple ways for the church to save money on operational expenditures. Some say that I’m cheap, but I prefer to be considered committed to missions and wise spending. That’s who I am. So, I end up using a lot of open source software.
I love Clonezilla. It’s an open source title comparable to Norton Ghost. Clonezilla has done some excellent things for me on a number of machines. It can really save a ton of time deploying new machines or replacing failing hard drives. Well, for some reason, it wouldn’t clone one of the partitions on Caleb’s hard drive. I did everything I knew how to do to make it work. I fixed the bad sectors, I ran tons of maintenance utilities, and I even got into the inner workings of Clonezilla and changed some of the script settings (scary, yes!).
Tonight, I bit the bullet and bought Paragon’s Drive Copy 8.5 Professional. It’s actually running right now, so I don’t have the final results, but it’s past the point that Clonezilla always crapped out. I’ve got to tell you that it looks like it’s going to be worth every penny of it’s $129 price tag. I have been pulling my hair out for weeks with this problem, and this thing looks like it’s going to do the trick. (I’ll know for sure in half an hour.)
What got me writing early on this, other than having nothing else to do but watch a progress bar, is that the rescue CD is very user friendly. It doesn’t look thrown together like so many other Linux-type rescue CD’s. It properly recognized the RAID, named the drives in easy human readable format (making it real hard to mess up the source and destination), and even lets me use the mouse. If this works, I don’t know if I’ll even install the Windows software that came with it.
So, hopefully my adventure with the Attack of the Clones is coming to an end. I’ll let you know how this thing pans out.
* UPDATE *
Drive Copy 8.5 worked like a champ! The single drive has been successfully cloned to the RAID. Now I’m a definite fan of Paragon Software!
Hi
I’ve tried various backup and disaster recovery software: norton, symantec, acronis, driveclone and the best one and most personal one for me was DriveClone Pro 5.0. Sure it might not be as fancy as the other one but it stands out uniquely on its own too with unique features such as:
1. snapshot: literally takes “snapshots” of your entire computer system including photo, data, outlook, microsoft, etc automatically as the intervals of your choice and incrementally. When virus, hacker attacks or you accidentally delete a company project, you simply click restore to one of the snapshots saved (such as to yesterday’s) and your computer goes back in time to yesterday’s conditions which was working conditions as if the disaster had never happened.
2. universal restore: restore to dissimilar hardware of different format, brand, size, operating system.
3. USB hot drive: backup and restore to a USB drive and view from it here as if it were local harddrive, a mini cloned hard drive
Before you fall completely symantec fan, I strongly recommend you to give DriveClone Pro a try.
more info: http://www.farstone.com/software/driveclone-pro.htm
free download trial: http://www.farstone.us/download/driveclone-pro/DriveClone-Pro-5.0.exe
GOOD LUCK CHOOSING THE ONE RIGHT FOR YOU.
I’m thinking this guy must work for Farstone as he’s commented on both posts about this. For what it’s worth…