Duplicating Files on Two Hard Drives to Make a Backup

[seawolf]

There are a few things that need to be considered:

1. Are you running the Hoster program from an internal or external drive?
2. Do you want/need a spare internal and/or external drive?

If you are running everything from an internal drive, you would be well advised to have a CLONE of that drive so that you can swap it out and be back up and running in less than 10 minutes. This also holds true if you keep the songs on an external drive. If either drive fails, you need an exact copy to continue without undue delay.

I am redundancy poor---I have a main laptop with everything running from its hard drive and I have a clone of that drive. I have an external drive with the songs & database on it in case the internal songs/database becomes corrupted. Believe it or not, this has happened when we had a lightning strike. I took a break, attached the external drive, re-built the database and continued the show.

I also have a second laptop that is basically a clone of the first, giving me redundancy to the max. Both of these machines are running Windows 7 Ultimate.

I use Acronis 10 for cloning and Folder Clone Pro to keep all of the songs and database info identical. Acronis True Image Home 2010 is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...cts/trueimage/

Folder Clone Professional is available to try or buy at: http://www.folderclone.com/fcinfo.htm

I'm sure there are other solutions, perhaps some better, but these have saved my bacon several times and I have never had to cancel due to equipment failure.

DC