Hard Drive Mirroring Tools - Protect Your Pictures, Music and Documents

Hard Drive Mirroring Tools - Protect Your Pictures,  Music and Documents
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The Growing Complexity of Computers

The Internet has permitted the ease of access to all kinds of data. This ease of access by surfing the web and downloading email has permitted users to download music, pictures and other forms of data. Within a small span of time, our computers have gone from megabytes to gigabytes and now to terabytes.

With the advent of Windows XP, multiple users became common place in homes globally. Being one of the first operating systems that allowed multiple users, the need for hard drive space became a necessity. Today a typical hard drive can contain hundreds of thousands of files.

Hard Drive Mirroring Tools

Acronis True Image

One of the best hard drive tools on the market today is Acronis True Image 2009 (BrightHub Review on Acronis). Acronis allows for ‘one click’ protection that can create an image (mirror your hard drive) that is highly customizable and can be used as a full, differential or incremental backup. Loaded with features, Acronis is an inexpensive way to keep a hard drive mirrored to protect your data.

Ultimate Boot CD

Ultimate Boot CD is an ISO tool that can be downloaded for free. Ultimate Boot CD is loaded with features that can give system information, test memory and the CPU, and perform a number of other useful things. Ultimate Boot CD contains several mirroring tools for hard drives that include the following utilities that are included or can be downloaded separately as freeware:

HardDrive Clone -HardDrive Clone (which is available free and in professional editions) allows for the cloning of a hard drive by mirroring the original drive or as a backup.

g4u -g4u allows for the mirroring of hard drives. This software is for a more advanced user and is freeware.

PC Inspector Clone Maxx -PC Inspector Clone Maxx by convar allows for cloning and mirroring that can transfer files at over 3 GB per minute. This high speed transfer includes support for FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS, Ext2 and more.

XXCopy - XXCopy is a mirroring and cloning software that allows hard drives to be copied. This easy to use software is free to use.

EASEUS Disk Copy - EASEUS Disk Copy is one of the easiest to use software applications that can be used for mirroring a hard drive.

While these software programs all come on the Ultimate Boot CD, they can be downloaded and used independently. There are advantages to professional versions vs. home versions that include easier to use interfaces and automated features.

Conclusion

In order to mirror a hard drive on your computer, there are several applications available that can be used. Home users should look at purchasing an extra hard drive to mirror their primary drive. This is often overlooked during the initial purchase of desktops or laptops. How to mirror the hard drive can vary between applications. Many applications can mirror to installed secondary drives, USB drives or across a network. Everyone should mirror their computer and plan for the unexpected.