Complete Drive Backup

[Survyor1]

Hello everyone,
I want to setup a RAID on my computer. I have 2 SATA drives all ready to go. However I wanna back up the one SATA that is in use and then copy it back on to the new setup. What will give me a true image with the least hassle? I keep seeing a program called Acromus True Image. Will this work for what I'm trying to do as I don't want to lose my extensive iTunes collection and don't want to add all of my programs back one by one.
Thank you to all who answer:)

[EzyStvy]

Acronics True Image will clone your drive to another drive pretty easily.

But, all you really need to do is copy n paste to a third drive...

You know about all the downsides to creating a Raid don't you?

[Survyor1]

Not aware of the downsides of RAID. I thought one drive constantly copying to another was a good way of keeping your info safe. Have I been mislead?

[faulkner132]

RAID 1 sounds like what you want, it keeps a mirror set of your hard drives, so if one fails the other one has your data.

You will either need a motherboard or a hard drive controller card which supports RAID 1.

[Survyor1]

Thank you, and my motherboard supports RAID. Is there a downside to doing this though?

[faulkner132]

Not really. It will slow down your machine a bit, but most likely you won't notice it.

You need to make sure your drives are the same size. Of course you won't get to use the space on the second drive because it is being used in the mirror.

[Survyor1]

The SATA drives are the same size and I've upgraded to 64 bit just haven't updated my signature yet. I hope next month to step upto a dual core AMD. Thank you for your help. :)

[kilgoretrout]

Raid 1 is not a substitute for backups. The main reason being if you do something to screw up your system, that error will be dutifully mirrored on the other raid drive. For backups, you are better off with an external hard drive and a good imaging program like acronis true image or norton ghost. Then periodically image your partitions to the external hard drive.

[Survyor1]

Thank you, Kilgoretrout. The drive you do a back up to, does it have to be as large as my primary drives or is the backup compressed allowing use of a smaller drive.

[glc]

You can use a smaller drive as long as it has enough space to store the compressed image file. Figure if you have 20 gigs of data on a drive, the image will be somewhere around 12 gigs as a rough guess.

If you buy Acronis True Image, you can do incremental and differential images too - so you don't have to do a whole image each time. They can even be scheduled to run unattended.

[Survyor1]

thank you GLC

[faulkner132]

Tooting my own horn, but here is my review of True Image 9.1. It's pretty impressive:
http://www.pcmech.com/show/softwarereviews/973/

[Survyor1]

thank you for the link

[David M]

Thanks Faulkner...I am going to buy True Image.