Scheduled Disk Cloning Software for Windows
|Wouldn’t it be great to be able to clone your operating system disk on a schedule to another disk, while Windows is running, so that in case the original breaks, you have the clone ready to go? This basically eliminates the restore operation altogether and provides you with a way to immediately recover from a total loss of the main hard disk or disk array. Wouldn’t it be great to do this while Windows, services, and applications are running, in the background, fully automatic, without any interference and without reboots and without any manual labor at all?
BackupChain has been offering this type of backup for many years now. Both the Server Enterprise and Server Enterprise for PCs Edition provide the schedulable disk cloning feature. It creates a clone while Windows is running without interfering with anything on the server or PC. Once the clone is complete, you can even keep it side-by-side with the original disk, to serve as a backup when you need it. If the original disk fails completely, all you need to do is change the BIOS setting to boot from the cloned disk. Naturally you could also take the clone and use it elsewhere on another server or PC to boot with.
Disk-to-disk cloning is very different from disk imaging. Disk imaging creates an image file that contains the disk contents of the disk you are backing up. In case of a failure, you could copy the contents of the disk image file back to a physical disk; however, this process can take many hours if it is a very large disk with a lot of data. A disk-to-disk clone eliminates this step. The clone is always ready to boot from.
With BackupChain, however, you can create multiple backup strategies, because every strategy has its pros and cons. Disk imaging, for example, allows you to go back in time by having many disk images stored on a backup server. Disk-to-disk cloning only reflects the disk contents from the last cloning operation. You could use several clones and clone on a schedule. That works well but requires multiple target disks. Disk imaging has the advantage of fitting several disk images on a single large backup drive, but it also involves a disadvantage because the disk image would have to be copied back to a new physical drive if a total loss occurred. For that reason, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons of each backup strategy and perhaps, if you can afford it, use multiple strategies to protect your business’s data.
Moreover, BackupChain creates disk image files of open standard formats. BackupChain creates virtual disk image files in the VHD, VHDX, VMDK, and VDI format. This allows you to mount disks directly in Windows and make them appear as a real drive, and then copy folders out of these images as needed. You can also use the VHD in Hyper-V or VMware, for example, and boot up the server as a virtual machine.
BackupChain provides all the various tools you need to implement countess hybrid backup strategies exactly the way you want. From scheduled disk-to-disk cloning, to disk imaging, file backup and file version backup, cloud backup, to remote backup, there are many different ways to protect your business from malware, ransomware, hardware failure, software corruption, and many other threats. All these threats can be effectively mitigated and numerous comprehensive backup strategies may be implemented with just one single tool containing all components needed: BackupChain, the all-in-one, complete backup solution for Windows.