Clone a live disk as backup (to cure a missing RAID)

hints and tool recommendations welcome!

[isync]

Hey folks,

I've got a running system here but upon setup of the box I did not think about founding it all on a redundancy solution of some sort, first choice would have been a RAID 1. Anyway, now I am here with the problem that my main drive might fail any time.

Moving data to a temp location, re-setting-up the system, and moving data back is *currently* no option. But installing another harddrive and mirroring all data as a sort of "near RAID 1" would be an option.

No, what technique would you recommend to copy or clone my main drive? I could think of a near-realtime solution, with a cron, let's say every 20 minutes, to copy/identify new data. But what tool can help me with that?

And- is there a way to exactly clone the drive, including bootrecords etc. so in a case of failure of drive 1, I just need to switch cables over to drive 2? Is there a way to do it incrementally, so the clone process doesn't start from scratch each time (peformance!)

Any hints and tool recommendations welcome!

[isync]

so far I found recommendations to use dd in combination with rsync. Also, a patched rsync (which I haven't hold of) would supply the --copy-devices option.

Any suggestions, command line examples for these?

[rocknbil]

Saw a sign once in an auto shop:" We would gladly grin ear to ear/if you would kindly tell us the make, model and year."

The solutions will vary based on your computer's type, OS, and application.

I recently used Acronis MigrateEasy to clone a drive - but that's Windows, and I don't know that it supports Unix/Linux. It works perfectly. Definitely not a Mac software.

[bill]

Look at the drive image software available for your platform. A drive image is a snapshot of your entire existing drive(s). Acronis makes some good bare-metal restore drive image software, but it isn't cheap.