Question: What would you recommend for a software 'RAID'?

[martin_ayton]

I'm running XP home on a PC that my wife uses to store a *lot* of family photos. She is not good at making backup copies to CD or DVD and so I'm getting twitchy about the possibility of losing the lot. I live in the sticks so my broadband connection only just qualifies for the name, which means offsite backup is probably not viable. So, what I want to do is put a second hard drive in the beige box and effectively RAID them together so that the backups are 'instant', seamless and require no user intervention. I had hoped to do that by using the 'Convert to Dynamic Disc' option in XP, but I find that that isn't available under XP Home. I have the second drive, but I'd like some software recommendations - does anyone here do something similar?

Thanks

Martin.

[Timothy Huber]

I haven't used it much, but the SyncToy power toy from Microsoft might do the trick. It's designed to keep two directories in sync. It was recently updated to v2.0. Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/synctoybeta.aspx

[martin_ayton]

Thanks Thuber, I'll check that out. There's a slew of software out there that would seem to do what I want, but very little of it is free, and whilst I don't mind paying for software that works, most of this is pretty expensive (US$50 and up). So, it helps to know from other people who have used it whether it is worth the cash.

[Timothy Huber]

Martin:

It's doesn't always run in the background, but can be set to automatically run using the Task Scheduler. I use it to back up new or changed media files from my Home Server to a PC I use with Mozy Backup so they can be backed up into "the cloud".

There are great instructions on scheduling SyncToy in the Help | About menu option.

Regards,
Tim