Windows 7 Home Edition - Thanks for not having software RAID

purecomedy · Post by **purecomedy** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 12:34 am

I went out and bought 2 new hard drives hoping to set up a mirror RAID on my PC. I decided I wanted to go with a simple Windows 7 software RAID and then find out my Home Edition of Windows 7 doesn't have that feature.

What's the best way for me to use some backup software to get a fairly real-time (once a day, once a week is fine) copy of Drive 1 to Drive 2 going? Most of the space would be movies, music, pictures so compression isn't going to save much space.

Windows Backup or something else?

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:37 am

Why not just buy an add-in RAID card? Software wise I use True Image.

purecomedy · Post by **purecomedy** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:23 am

By True Image, you mean the one by Acronis right?

This Dell computer was bought in 2009, not that interested in investing in hardware. This Dell actually has hardware RAID capability, it has no documentation or instructions and I just don't feel like pooching my C partition on my solid state drive while attempting to get these hard drives in a RAID properly. Literally all I have is an option in BIOS "RAID or SATA". I just have this feeling like I flip it to RAID, it overwrites my C drive with something I don't want and then I can kiss a few hours goodbye trying to recover my C drive (which is on an SSD which has some weird differences in formatting from a normal HD that I forget all about). I want SATA SDD, RAID on hard drives...not seeing how I get there in this case.

I've just been there too many times, when I "play" with things I usually end up with an "oops" and fixing things going a lot longer than I had ever planned spending on the computer.

P.S. I also sadly don't believe I have any extra slots for a good RAID card, the giant fans on the video card render one of the other slots useless.

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 1:55 pm

Acronis, yes.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:48 pm

crashplan works great

http://www.code42.com/crashplan/

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 6:58 pm

Thanks Mark! I was looking at the site and it seems unlimited and free. Is that correct? If so, I will definitely be getting my faculty, staff and students using this immediately.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:20 pm

it's free for home use but i use the payed cloud backup which is worth it to me.

morbidpete turned me on to this a few years ago

i tried moby and carbonite, both suck in my opinion

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 9:27 pm

I've been using FreeFileSync for a couple of years and have been quite happy with it. About once a week I drop my back HDD into my external drive bay, open the software, click and everything from the preset folders is backed up. It checks for dupes etc.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:52 pm

You can do image backups using the built in backup in Windows 7.

Bear in mind that raid is not designed or meant to be used as a backup of data. It's pretty useless for a home computer. It's meant to be used to seamlessly have one drive take over for the other when it fails. But both can fail at the same time by the same causes, e.g lightning strikes, power surges, theft, etc.

For back up, there are better and more robust solutions: images, cloud, external drives, etc.