sorry for the n00b questions, but i've been out of the game for a long time... i basically built this server 4 years ago and have sadly neglected it since... one of the drives in my mirror died, so instead of just replacing it, i'm going to move the contents to a bigger drive and build a new mirror... what's the best way to do this while fulfilling the following requirements

-must retain shared/security permissions
-must be able to verify perfect copy with no corruption
-using win2k3

should i be looking at cloning the drive with something like clonezilla? or use a backup program? or just drag and drop the contents of the whole drive in windows?

what's a good way of verifying the copy without hashing the entire drive?

Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage are much easier to use than clonezilla.

Both Western Digital and Seagate have free branded versions of Acronis TrueImage. They both validate by checking if you have one of the company's models of disk drive in the system. The qualifying drive does not have to involved in the clone or other operations.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?l ... 04090aRCRD

http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... dc_lang=en

Using backup software that may refuse to work for licensing resons when you need it is reckless.


I don't understand your problem. If you have mirrors then you should have a way to copy your data properly!

Microsoft has a utility called robocopy which is designed to mirror files. It's supposed to preserve permissions but I don't remember if it can verify.
I've also used a third-party utility called XXCOPY. The xcopy utility included in Windows may do the job as well. And I've used rsync on Windows a lot(there's a package called cwrsync if you don't want to install cygwin). These utilities can verify but I don't recall if and how they handle permissions.

There's more than one way you can end up with corrupted files so I do recommend "hashing the entire drive" actually. That's what copy utilities will do if they have a proper verify function anyway.
If you create hashes at the file level or lower and keep them around, you'll be able to verify your copy with only the target drive connected. But the main point is that you'll be able to detect corruption regardless of what caused it in the future (bug, bad RAM, user error, malware and so on) as well as verify copies faster.

If migrated many systems from one HDD to another using WD's Acronis utility. I've never had a problem except with my initial trial of it back in 2005 (Windows MCE 2005), and a simple reinstall of a driver cured the problem.

I can't attest to the verify function, however. I would never try to clone a drive on a critical device (just HTPC's or gaming machines). I'd always plan on a full backup (or two) of the data before doing a clean install.

There's just too much that can go wrong if the device or data is critical...

Xcopy has been replaced by robocopy, but I believe the switches are the same. You can google cloning a hard drive to find the settings. I plan on doing this once I move to my idle SSD.