I did about the same thing except with an EHD. Used Easus Partition Master 9.2.1 Home Edition and the W/7 (Home Premium) backup program puts it onto my choice of partitions on the EHD (if it gets turned on). I think when you start the W/7 backup it recognizes all and presents you a choice of locations.

Hard to remember the details exactly - it hasn't been long enough ago. :-)

I like the easeUS Todo backup Free version.
I set it to standard priority and medium compression and don't even notice it when it set to run 2x weekly and saves 4 images. You can browse it and retrieve any file or folder out of the image in a normal manner. Re-images work fine. (About 13gb win8 sys img).

But Windows 7 system image works fine too... best to make task for wbAdmin to run it for me. Unless windows updates or something it runs every day maybe 3 minutes.to do its Incremental block system back up here. (about 30gb.)

This post was edited by mikie on Fri, Jun 14, 13 at 15:38

EaseUS Todo backup seems to get great reviews from my
searches on Google. So I'm trying it out.

Thanks.

Pooh Bear

I don't know the one you're trying, but I've found SyncBack to be very flexible and easy to use. You can set it to run on a schedule or simply trigger the backups when you wish. It's free to download.

You don't say, but your "second" drive is suitable to use for backups if it's external and detached from the PC when not in use, and it wouldn't be suitable for backups if it's internal or always connected.

My second drive is internal. I originally wanted to run RAID 1
but my computer guy said something about not being able to
do that with my particular setup.

With EaseUS Todo backup, if I do have a failure of the first drive,
how do I recover my OS and data from the back up drive?

Pooh Bear

The W/7 backup did 2 things: it cloned the itself on one of my partitions, backs up the data on another. It's all set up and programed to do that. Did you read thru W/7 backup help?

I am confused about something. The poster wants to back up his computer on his computer instead of an external HD. Wouldn't you lose everything if your computer crashed. I had one that would not come on at all. I took it to a repair shop and they said the hard drive was bad and it cost $300. to replace it, I decided on a new one. I would have lost everything if I had not used an external HD.

I'm backing up a hard drive on my computer to a different hard drive on my computer. If one hard drive goes bad, I still have the other one with all my data on it. One computer, two separate physical hard drives. It's the same principle as backing up to an external drive. The backup drive just happens to be conveniently located inside the computer.

Pooh Bear

I have used the EaseUSToDo free backup for several years on my XP computer, except to an external HDD. When you are ready to restore, that choice is available, and it does a great job. In fact, I had to use the restore feature about a year ago, and I didn't lose anything.

poohbear, my computer wouldn't start up for me or the shop that evaluated it. I could not have accessed the other HD.

I can always pull the hard drive out and slave it to another computer.
I want a backup solution that gets me back up and running as
quick as possible. That's why I wanted to use RAID 1.
I keep all my files on external drives or burned to DVD data disks.
I guess what I need is to make disk images of my hard drive.
That way I won't have to re-install Windows and all my programs.

Pooh Bear

This works until there's a fire or something inside your case. Backing up to separate drives inside a single computer is better than no back up at all, but it's not as good as using a computer in a different location.

Long ago I heard a comedian say that some teenage years are awkward because kids think they're cool, they think they've learned "Where it's at/What it is" but it's usually before they learn what to do with "it". This story has some of that.

Unless you're trying to speed up frequent read/write ops of very large files, RAID 1 is useless. RAID anything is never backup anyway and given how many drives get fried by power surges, lightning or power supply problems, backing up anything to a second internal drive is unlikely to be of value for disaster recovery. It's onboard, in the same box, in the same room, and is vulnerable to have the same problem at the same time as the primary drive does.

If PC access is mission critical for making money (work or business), make sure you have or have immediate access to a PC spare. If this is just a personal make-work project or you're trying to plan ahead to avoid inconvenience, I say cool down and calmly get or make recovery disks. I'd ignore the second internal drive.

You need to burn a bootable image file to dvd or cd from easeUS options, to have its own boot from DVD/CD program and to install one of its images should your system drive get screwed up.

One thing that is cool to me for reimaging or reinstalling is dropbox. Even an old image... DropBox will replace any missing docs/picts exc or bring old ones up to date,,,, to the old image install automatically as soon as you start up dropbox. Kind of like a magic backup of the library's.

Here is a link that might be useful: dropbox, referal = free extra space for u&me

This post was edited by mikie on Sun, Jun 16, 13 at 1:14

Thanks for the explanation Pooh.