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I'll try to keep it short - I have windows 7 and ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed.

Windows has recently stopped working (involving all kinds of messages during start up that say that my hard drive is likely to fail soon)

I do not have a windows recovery disk/drive handy

I do, however, have a freshly installed blank second hard drive (internal)

How would I go about backing everything up to the second hard drive? And for future reference, is there a way to have both hard drives sync to each other permanently?

Thank you!

3 Answers 3

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If the spare drive is larger than the (supposedly) failing, than you can simply copy the entire disk by using the dd command:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

(Of course replace the device file names according to your configuration.)

None of these disks should be mounted, so use an Ubuntu LiveCD for running dd.

If the disk is indeed failing than you must use additional options so that bad sectors are replaced with 0 bytes.

If the disk has a GPT partition table, than you have to prevent to attach disks with identical partition GUIDs.

It is not a good idea to mirror a failing disk for obvious reasons. It seems you need a proper backup system. A mirror is not backup! It also mirrors bad data, like the result of rm -rf /. Backup is multiple snapshots taken at different times.

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You can do this in 2 ways. Either back up Ubuntu manually or mirroring your 2 drives using a RAID 1 configuration.

Back up Ubuntu

This is probably the easiest method. You can use deja dup or a similar tool to back up either individual folders or your whole system to your other drive. There is a guide on using deja dup here.

Set up drive mirroring using RAID

This method takes a bit more work but it is probably easier in the long run. RAID 1 is where your 2 hard drives will mirror each other e.g. if you write 200MB of data to disk it will be automatically written to both drives, therefore if one disk ever fails you will have a complete backup. I've never done this myself, but as far as I know you will have to reinstall Ubuntu to do this. I've found a few guides for you here and here.

Hope this answers your question!

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Use GParted for easy 1shot mirror

Catch is: you will need another machine that you can attach both drives to. Or boot an OS from USB and then attach both machines to it

(External drive mount device is a must have IMHO)

After that it is trivial. Right click copy/paste (BUT TAKE CARE!)

https://gparted.org/liveusb.php

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