Windows 7 hardrive mirror

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Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby gnaruki » Wed May 16, 2012 5:45 am

I'm thinking of setting up a RAID 1 for my laptop. I had a scare last night when my laptop bag strap broke causing my laptop to take a bit of a beating. Apparently my hard drive is still working but it made me rethink my complete lack of backup.

Anyone have any links for setting up a mirrored external drive?
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby Kurt » Wed May 16, 2012 9:57 am

Windows 7 will do that for you with its built in backup utility but you cannot raid a laptop since they do not take two disks.

The best bet is to buy a "Toaster"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817153071

+ whatever hard drive is cheapest and the size you want.

Plug it into your laptop and go to the control panel and look for a the backup utility.
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby thewalrus » Wed May 16, 2012 1:46 pm

RAID is not a backup!
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby thewalrus » Wed May 16, 2012 1:48 pm

Kurt wrote:Windows 7 will do that for you with its built in backup utility but you cannot raid a laptop since they do not take two disks.

The best bet is to buy a "Toaster"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817153071

+ whatever hard drive is cheapest and the size you want.

Plug it into your laptop and go to the control panel and look for a the backup utility.


you can most definitely set up RAID1 or RAID0 with a laptop, any modern laptop (not ultra-slim) has a 9.5mm or 12.5mm height optical drive bay with a SATA interface that can accept a caddy holding a second hard drive. it's not an uncommon configuration with high-end workstation laptops like the thinkpad W520 or similar, where somebody absolutely needs a ton of storage (1TB+1TB) or is paranoid enough to run RAID-1. it does hurt the battery life a bit.

the easiest way to back up a laptop is to use an external hard drive sufficient to hold the whole laptop, and rsync everything starting from the root of the filesystem.
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby Kurt » Wed May 16, 2012 9:47 pm

thewalrus wrote:
Kurt wrote:Windows 7 will do that for you with its built in backup utility but you cannot raid a laptop since they do not take two disks.

The best bet is to buy a "Toaster"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817153071

+ whatever hard drive is cheapest and the size you want.

Plug it into your laptop and go to the control panel and look for a the backup utility.


you can most definitely set up RAID1 or RAID0 with a laptop, any modern laptop (not ultra-slim) has a 9.5mm or 12.5mm height optical drive bay with a SATA interface that can accept a caddy holding a second hard drive. it's not an uncommon configuration with high-end workstation laptops like the thinkpad W520 or similar, where somebody absolutely needs a ton of storage (1TB+1TB) or is paranoid enough to run RAID-1. it does hurt the battery life a bit.

the easiest way to back up a laptop is to use an external hard drive sufficient to hold the whole laptop, and rsync everything starting from the root of the filesystem.


I always go for easy first. But this is from a guy who has never lost data from a failed disk in 12 years of administration at work but has always lost critical data from a disk from every hard drive failure I had at home (my most recent was two weeks ago...3 months between backups. I am using this down time to try to master the incredibly and needlessly complicated Server 2008....I hate it so much.
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby gnaruki » Wed May 16, 2012 9:55 pm

I'm really just too much of a lazy slob to clean up my file tree and would rather mirror the harddrive and put it into another machine and get all the hardware working the hard way.

Maybe I'll just do the tedious job of organizing my files and picking up a new harddrive. At the end of the day it is probably less time to do it the way I'm familiar with.
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby kilroy » Thu May 17, 2012 12:41 pm

there is software like double-take if you are just looking to replicate from one machine to another, but chances are that it would also replicate any buggy behavior if that's why you're looking to change up hard drives. personally i like to start from a clean slate every couple years, i really only save my pictures and the music i really dig.
when they ask how you feeling
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something you should probably try feeding
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby gnaruki » Fri May 25, 2012 6:34 pm

I'm a little paranoid because the fan is making suspicious noises and the audio works when it feels like it.

I'm going to organize my files and backup the important stuff then pop open the hood (take it apart clumsily with a stripped screw driver while still plugged into an outlet).

But thanks for the geek info, i'll probably use it towards other nerd projects.
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Re: Windows 7 hardrive mirror

Postby Kurt » Sat May 26, 2012 5:07 am

My experience is that a hosed fan eventually means a hosed system.

Back up everything now.
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