Clone my HDD

[jesse]

How can I clone my HDD so that if in any case when it jams or crashes I can just plug in the standby and then it will boot up like that the last time I backed it up?

[iSellJerseyShore]

Norton Ghost will solve your problem! It will make an exact copy of your drive on a spare drive. If your primary should fail, all you need to do is boot off of the "spare" drive.

BAM you are back in business with all your data as it was on the original drive.


-iSellJerseyShore

[apcbill]

This is a Linux thread so I assume you want to use a Linux tool. You can do it with dd. If the hard drives are identical make and model. You can do something like dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k.

There are ways to do it over the network with dd and netcat. And with different sized hard drives as well. I gave you the most basic method.

[shawn]

you can use Norton Ghost, this program is very good

[scoob8000]

DD and netcat are two very powerful tools for linux. Be careful in their usage, mainly DD. With the wrong command or syntax you could wipe out your HDD.

Another free (linux) alternative is Partimage.

I use a bootable cd (SystemRescueCd) that has DD, netcat, partimage, and a few other useful tools for all my backup needs. Rarely will I use ghost anymore. DD is much more thorough.

[elena29]

I recommend using Norton Ghost. It is quite inexpensive and offers a really good performance in production environments, being used by several large companies as their primary backup solution.