Best back up option.

[Percy1983]

Ok firstly I am running 2 500gb hard drives in a raid 0 to which one has started clicking on startup, its current running fine and passes all tests. Of course it would be stupid to ignore this problem and I have checked and I still have a warrenty on both hard drives.

Now the simple answer is backup send hard drive away and then restore, but I have a big problem as this has happened at the wrong time really. In short I do charity work for a local school and produce shows etc (the nativity this time, shocking I know) and in short I can't afford down time as deadlines are so tight anyway.

Now I have my hands on a 1.5TB USB hard drive so can do a full backup but the question is can I make a fully bootable backup on the USB drive and update it everyday so if my hard drive does fail I can boot up form there (with slightly hobbled performance).

By all means it will all be over in a week and half to which I will pull the faulty drive and send it off, but in the meantime whats the best way of making a backup.

Would synctoy do the job? I know it would backup and then update as needed but would araw copy of everything be all I need, I have checked and my motherboard can boot from USB.

Sorry for the long post, just a bit worried about letting the children down.

[peterb]

Well certainly backup now. If one drive in a RAID0 array fails, you are going to have to reuild the array from scratch anyway. There is no syncing or redundancy in RAID0 (In fact for general use there is no compelling reason to use RAID0 at all)

If your spare drive is in a USB caddy, you could clone (image) the array to the USB drive, then remove it from the caddy and install it as the boot drive in the computer. I doubt you would notice any performance hit (in fact write performance might be slightly better)

You would need to determine just how Windos (if you are using Windows) recognises the Array (depends on the array controller) to ensure that the single drive is recognised as the boot drive.

[ultimatedesk]

Have you considered putting all of your data files onto the external USB drive, and then setting up a Windows USB Key to boot off of in case your internal drive fails? If I'm not mistaken, there is software available to set this up for you using Windows XP.