8

I work for a PC Repair company and we are looking into setting up a dedicated machine with externally accessible SATA bays to clone harddrives as a safety net incase something goes wrong during a repair. We currently use a SATA/PATA to USB bridge called MagicBridge and Norton Ghost on any workstation, but we're looking to move away from Ghost.

We have a computer with a large RAID5 array with Windows Server 2008 Standard currently installed, but this can be replaced with a flavour of *nix. I have some experience with Clonezilla, but FSArchiver also seems like a suitable replacment too.

My Head Technician wants to know if my chosen solution (probably Clonezilla or FSArchiver, but I'm open to free suggestions) is capable of:

  1. Cloning a degraded RAID, such as a single drive from a RAID1 mirror without complaining
  2. Producing images that are easily mountable (he'd prefer them to be mountable in Windows, but if there is no other easy way, *nix should be fine) akin to Ghost Explorer so individual files can be restored as well as being able to do bare metal restores.

My apologies for wordiness but I wanted to be thorough in my explaination.

Thanks for any suggestions or tips :)

EDIT: I've just found out that Clonezilla has a workaround for cloning RADI1 drives

EDIT2: Found the answer to both of my questions, aparently I wasn't phrasing my searches right, could this question be deleted please?

4
  • 8
    Just formulate what you found as an answer and accept it. This way, other people wondering about the same problem can use what you wrote.
    – Sven
    Aug 18, 2010 at 12:22
  • 1
    Yes, please. It's a good question. Aug 18, 2010 at 13:39
  • Agreed. Please, by all means, take credit for your own research. By posting your answer, you can help others in a similar spot.
    – Jesse
    Oct 22, 2010 at 20:09
  • I agree. Please share your answer! :)
    – simon
    Dec 9, 2010 at 19:06

2 Answers 2

1

I don't know much about the multicast possibilities of this program but for what it's worth - RedoBackup.org is an amazing bare metal imaging solution that we love, pretty hard to screw up because its so simple.

-1

If you are not looking for a free or opensource product just take a look at Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 or Acronis SnapDeploy 3.

I'm using Backup & Recovery 10 and I'm very satisfied.

If you need more information or help do not hesitate.

Saladin.

1
  • 1
    I'm no expert but last I checked, was Acronis not a commercial company? Jan 10, 2011 at 9:53

You must log in to answer this question.