Hard Drive Synchrinising

[ppentertainments]

At present I have my gig hard drive which is the one kept up to date. My backup hard drive I update about once a month by formatting it and then copying all the files over from the main HD.

Is there an easier and quicker way of doing this too keep the back up HD more up to date. My worry is that if the main HD does go down it would be sods law that the tracks needed won't have been copied over.

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

How have you got your songs grouped?

[Excalibur]

This may not be the proper way to do it, but as my tracks come in, I put them on a flash drive, and copy them to the drives in turn, deleting them after the last operation. Thus all drives are theoretically updated simultaneously.

[Vectis]

I have my gigging drive organised in such a way that only two folders need to be refreshed in order to clone them... one called "Chart 2009" (which is obvious really) and one called "Events 2009" in which I keep copies of specific customer requests grouped by function.

I use the "Events XXX" folders at year end to determine if anything is worthy of promotion to my main folders, and the "Chart XXXX" usually results in a couple of dozen of the year's best songs being filed elsewhere for quick reference.

So I don't "clone" per se, other than once a year. Updates take about 5 minutes each month or so.

[Danno13]

Take a look at this http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Brilliant peice of software, syncs both ways and only does the files that have changed so saves loads of time!

[Vectis]

My advice to anyone considering 2-way sync software would be to ensure you have a 100% complete read-only backup elsewhere.

One mistake...

[nigelwright7557]

At present I have my gig hard drive which is the one kept up to date. My backup hard drive I update about once a month by formatting it and then copying all the files over from the main HD.

Is there an easier and quicker way of doing this too keep the back up HD more up to date. My worry is that if the main HD does go down it would be sods law that the tracks needed won't have been copied over.

On some PC's you can set them up as raid.
There are various modes for raid but one is to copy the data to two seperate drives.

I have never done it but there will be plenty of info if you google it.

[Vectis]

On some PC's you can set them up as raid.
There are various modes for raid but one is to copy the data to two seperate drives.

I have never done it but there will be plenty of info if you google it.

Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay....

To utilise RAID as a method of cloning disks is a very risky business indeed. It CAN be done (RAID 1 mirror) BUT a regular breaking/making of the mirror is bound to cause long-term issues, quite apart from the remaking process taking hours and battering the hell out of your disk subsystem all the time it's happening.

RAID is great for failover but it absolutely isn't designed for this purpose.

[ppentertainments]

How have you got your songs grouped?

I have folders according to type ie now, artists, motown etc then sub folders for each album title. I prefer to keep this way incase I ever use cd's again.

This may not be the proper way to do it, but as my tracks come in, I put them on a flash drive, and copy them to the drives in turn, deleting them after the last operation. Thus all drives are theoretically updated simultaneously.

Sensible !!

[Excalibur]

Hey, don't go calling me sensible, it's bad for my image!