Does anyone have any advice on cloning my computer so that if I loose the drive in the computer I wont have to go thru the problem of reinstalling every program I have.
First, let's clarify something. I'll be talking about two things:
-
data redundancy
- high
availability
These two subjects are
completely independent and should be dealt with completely separately.
"Data redundancy" means having multiple copies of your data on physically diverse filesystems. If you've got a bunch of external drives & you back up your stuff to a given pair of them, then you should be fine here (though if you really want to be covered one of them should live offsite or at least in a fire safe so that if your house burns down or you get broken into you're still covered).
Time Machine should have you pretty much covered for your system backups. Just get an external drive and designate the whole thing as a time machine volume & you should be fine.
Now, the trickier question is "high availability", which is the ability of your system to keep working without affecting you if a drive fails (or any other component for that matter, but we're talking about drives here). The usual solution for this is RAID. Most of the time, RAID is a complicated PitA and should only be messed with if you
really need it (the mantra is "if you don't
know you need it, you don't need it"
.
But there are a few devices that make it very, very easy. If you've got a machine with drive bays like a Mac Pro then you should be able to use most of them, but there are also firewire based devices. Let me also say here that if Apple had not ignored eSATA this would be really easy.
Here are some companies that make this stuff:
Arco IDE
Maxtronic
Accusys
Basically, you plug the controller board into the sata port on your machine, and the controller has two sata connectors to which you connect your drives. There is no software to install. The controller transparently writes data to both drives. If one fails, it makes noise or has blinky lights that tell you, you change the drive, & it copies the data from the remaining drive over to the fresh one.
The big difference between these controllers & software RAID is that they don't use a proprietary format on the disk so that you can get to your data if you put the disk into another system or the controller dies or whatever. It's just a normally formatted disk.
Now, all that said, I don't have any experience with OS X's software RAID mirroring; you might be able to get close-to-similar functionality out of it without buying anything other than a second drive. Note that I said
mirroring here, not the other RAID options that OS X offers you.
Come to think of it, if you had a laptop you might be able to get an identical drive to your internal drive, stick it in an external firewire box, and mirror your internal drive onto it.
this link describes how to activate mirroring on a volume without reformatting. The drawback would be that you'd need to fiddle with the raid utility every time you disconnect or reconnect the drive, but if your internal drive ever croaked you could just swap it out & you'd be back in business. I've never tried this, so YMMV.
Anyway, there are a few ideas for you. Good luck.
