Disk Clone

[nihil]

OK, I think I understand.

#2. With a single drive your cloning, ghosting or mirroring software will only copy readable files. If it finds damaged or corrupted ones it will either copy them as is, or throw an error. It will not copy stuff in sectors that are marked as bad.

#1. I don't think that it will work due to the nature of RAID arrays. They look on all drives as one, so cloning only works when you are moving from one platform to another or deploying multiple installations. That is, the array is not changing, as it is not being used.

As soon as you start to use a RAID array, you change the contents of the individual drives, so a clone does not work.

Sure, you could use it to restore back to the original installation on a clean set of drives, but why would you want to do that when you have already invested in RAID?

What you are seeming to suggest is already handled by RAID 1............... straight mirroring or "cloning" of the drives.

Otherwise you need one of the more exotic RAID deployments that handles mirroring of some data/drives and striping of others. I have already suggested that you look at RAID6, as that gives you one extra recovery channel.

Otherwise I would suggest a parallel processing environment with duplicate hardware sets in different locations. The issue is obviously that whatever RAID you use, all your drives are in the one location?

As for cloning or mirroring or copying, the rules are the same as for #2 above. It will only copy readable stuff.