I work for a PC Repair company and we are looking into setting up a dedicated machine with externally accessible SATA bays to clone harddrives as a safety net incase something goes wrong during a repair. We currently use a SATA/PATA to USB bridge called MagicBridge and Norton Ghost on any workstation, but we're looking to move away from Ghost.
We have a computer with a large RAID5 array with Windows Server 2008 Standard currently installed, but this can be replaced with a flavour of *nix. I have some experience with Clonezilla, but FSArchiver also seems like a suitable replacment too.
My Head Technician wants to know if my chosen solution (probably Clonezilla or FSArchiver, but I'm open to free suggestions) is capable of:
- Cloning a degraded RAID, such as a single drive from a RAID1 mirror without complaining
- Producing images that are easily mountable (he'd prefer them to be mountable in Windows, but if there is no other easy way, *nix should be fine) akin to Ghost Explorer so individual files can be restored as well as being able to do bare metal restores.
My apologies for wordiness but I wanted to be thorough in my explaination.
Thanks for any suggestions or tips :)
EDIT: I've just found out that Clonezilla has a workaround for cloning RADI1 drives
EDIT2: Found the answer to both of my questions, aparently I wasn't phrasing my searches right, could this question be deleted please?
I don't know much about the multicast possibilities of this program but for what it's worth - RedoBackup.org is an amazing bare metal imaging solution that we love, pretty hard to screw up because its so simple.
If you are not looking for a free or opensource product just take a look at Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 or Acronis SnapDeploy 3.
I'm using Backup & Recovery 10 and I'm very satisfied.
If you need more information or help do not hesitate.
Saladin.