Need to Copy My Drive in case Drive Crashes? What Software to use?

I use a SSD Crucial 128GB drive as the boot and main storage for program files storage. I have two more drives, a WD 1 TB and a 2 TB Seagate.

How do you Ghost, or whatever term is used, my SSD boot drive and Windows 7 settings to one or both of my HDD's?

I'd like to make it so that if things crash I simply switch over to the Copied or Ghosted HDD without a hitch.

How and what software does this for me?

 

If you purchase a Seagate, WD or Maxtor, you can get the Acronis Trueimage software (free) and make an image of your OS and

put it on your other hdds.

If you need to recover your OS ( including programs, updates, etc) you can do it with a few clicks.

You can also use Easeus for free and any hdd will work.

Seagate - http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/

WD - http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

Easeus - http://www.filehorse.com/download-easeus-todo-backup/

:wave

See you have a Seagate hdd - you can download Trueimage (discwizard) and with few clicks, you can restore your saved image.
Same goes for WD.

 

This WD link might be easier to follow-

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en

 

Just so you are aware, it's not necessarily going to be a simple case of switch to the backup drive and start again. For example, Norton Ghost (not sure if that's still around) would create an image on a second drive. If your first drive crashed, you then had to use Norton Ghost again to get a working operating system on a new drive; you couldn't simply boot directly from the second (Ghost) drive.

You can have an image of your operating system and then back your files up separately. That gives you immediate access to your files in the event of a disaster, using another system. A good way to go with that is to do the initial backup of all your files and then decide if you want the files backed up live or on a schedule and what that schedule ought to be.

Oh, and some terminology for you. People talk about ghosting because of Norton Ghost. Correct terminology is creating an image.

Backing up is not necessarily imaging. Simply making a copy of all your files is a back up but not an image. An image is usually one or a few more files that consist of all the files you wanted in the image.

An image is an ideal way to go about backing up the operating system itself because trying to copy an entire Windows installation to another drive won't work; various files are locked because they are in use and won't be copied.

 

There's a Linux based app called Clonezilla which will clone your drive to another drive of the same or larger size. It comes as a bootable ISO that you burn to CD.

 

Multibooting in most newish versions of Linux will allow complete copies of any Windows operating systems. You must use the same name & password for both operating systems AFAIK to bypass the user protections.

If your original boot-drive was nominally "Drive-C", then the supposed replacement drive must be a nominal "Drive-C". I use my spinning platters to duplicate my SSD boot partition. If the SSD crashes, just rename the hard-disk partition to what Windows thinks is Drive-C, & it's all ok.

Microsoft op systems allow just a few critical factors the alter when booting duplicate op systems. So your W. op system should not be too different to the pre-crash system. That's why most of my work is in Linux (data on NTFS-compressed partitions).

The only time I use Windows is for some apps that work only or best in Windows.