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Dave....you said "imagine the C drive onto the D drive"....do you mean perform my Full Backup and Incrementals onto the D drive instead of my external drive like I'm doing now? And then use Offsite Copy to an external for a backup of the backup?
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Correct.
My personal feelings are that external drives should not be connected all the time unless absolutly necessary.
Imaging the system partition onto another internal hard drive has several advantages. The main one being that the internal hard drive is always availible and has better performance than an external drive.
In my opinion, the most common reasons for needing to restore the operating system partition is from problems caused by problems whith software being installed or removed, infection from a virus, user error, or other windows problems.
The second most common reason is hard drive problems or failure. Imaging a system partition onto a second hard drive protects against that because both hard drives will not fail at the same time unless it's a system failure rather than a hard drive failure.
If the first hard drive fails your protected because you have system images on the second hard drive. If the second hard drive fails it's no big deal because your first hard drive with the operating system is still working.
In all the above examples, making images onto the second hard drive will protect the operating system partition and all the user data if that is where it is stored.
The main reason for an "offsite copy" or images on an external drive is to hold all the backups "outside" the computer.
That protects you from complete system failure like a motherboard going bad or power problems like a surge or lighting strike in the neighborhood that can "fry" your system.
If the external drive is stored "offsite" in another location, then your protected against theft of the system or (heaven forbid) if your house gets damaged by fire, flood, or earthquake.
So yes, storing copies of images provides redundancy but the most common reasons for restoring an image are covered by having the main images on another internal drive.
The "offsite copy" feature of Ghost provides "local redundancy" by automatically copying the images onto an external drive.
Manually copying images or manually making "one time backups" onto the second external drive provides more redundancy and allows for a true offsite copy if that drive is kept elsewhere.
I use an external drive to keep images of my home system in my office at work, and to bring copies of my office systems images so I can store them on my home computer.
Depending on the size of your second hard drive and the amount of data you already store on it, it would actually be better to partition that drive so you can have a dedicated partitio for the images and then be able to backup the data partition as well.
But thats just how I would do it, trying to do everything with external drives my cause problems when the first external isn't connected at the time of the scheduled backup, and it's going to require both being connected at the time of the offsite copy.
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periodically manually copy a current image set from the D drive to the second external drive"....what exactly is meant by manually coping? Is this the same as Making copies of Recovery Points as I've read pg 139 of the manual? Or is this a Windows drag/drop thing? Or something completely different?
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Either way or whatever is eaiser.
If they are single image files without incrementals, I right click on them and select: Send to > external drive
A little eaiser than a windows drag and drop. Red also suggested using a sync program to keep the second external drive updated like the other, or the internal drive.
The feature you ask about "making copies of recovery points" will also work and has an advantage if your copying an image that consists of a base image and incrementals. By opening the last incremental, Ghost will turn the whole backup set into one image file and write that image to another location (copy it).
Dave