After a recent episode where my C: (system) disk failed, I had to reinstall everything on the new disk. There must be a way to copy everything on my C: disk to another one so if the first one fails, I can simply replace it with the new one, but I don’t know how to do that.
At work, we use Norton Ghost to make backup copies of single-disk systems.
Norton Ghost is not free software. There are free alternatives available, such as Acronis True Image. I’ve never used this or any of the other alternates, so I can’t say how well they work.
Windows also has a backup utility built into it. The older versions were a bit wonky, but I haven’t played around with it since the XP days. It’s probably a lot better these days, but again, I have no experience with it.
A software RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) will allow you to have two disks in the system that will be treated as a single disk. The advantage is that if one fails, you simply take out the bad disk and put in a new one to replace it, and since the other disk has an exact copy of everything, you don’t lose anything (replacing a disk takes a while since the system has to resync the two disks). The disadvantage is that whenever you write something to disk, it takes twice as long since it has to write to both disks, though with modern disk caching the delays may not be all that significant, depending on your system usage.
Windows 8 and later have RAID capability built into them.
I don’t know about free solutions, but I’ve long (as in for something like 15 years or more) used Ghost.
How standard is hardware RAID on motherboards these days? Mine has it (up to RAID 5) and it is a few years old and wasn’t an expensive one at the time it was new. He may have it and not know it.
I believe Norton Ghost is available only as an enterprise solution. It used to be sold as a single-user license for individuals but they stopped that a couple of years ago and the last version supported only through Windows 7. At home I use a paid version of Acronis True Image to backup my personal computer.
Pretty standard on all but the lowest end boards from what I’ve seen.
I don’t go out looking at the specs of every motherboard out there, but in my admittedly limited experience, hardware RAID seems common on server motherboards. For home PC type boards, I’ve seen hardware RAID on several Intel-based boards, but I haven’t seen it on AMD-based boards. I’m guessing it’s a common feature of Intel chipsets? I dunno. Just a guess.
There is image software available. Ghost is only one. Acronis True Image, Easeus Todo Backup are others. Just google it. There are many because this method of backup is a very useful tool. You need an external hd (or at least a 2nd hd in your tower) to copy the image of your C drive to. These programs have you make a CD bootdisk to use in case of problems. If the worst happens, e.g. your C drive OS crashes and is unbootable, you get a super virus, etc, you simply boot from the CD and navigate to the drive where the image of C drive is located and then have it copy this image back to the original C drive. You can store various images from different dates and thus time travel back to restore a working image from a certain date onto your C drive. This also works if you install a new hard drive and wish to instantly copy over a saved image from your old dead hd to the new C drive.
This has saved my bacon on innumerable occasions.