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Brad in Tyler, Texas listens on 97.5 KTBB and asked: "Is there a way to make an identical hard drive to the one that is typically used on a computer, that way if one crashes, you can just go to the backup one? We used quite a few different programs. It seem like every time a hard drive crashes - just a few times over the last couple years - it's just a big pain to get everything set back up. It'd be great if that second hard drive was just always copying all the changes that are made and you could just go to that one if the first one crashes."

Brad, there are two ways, you can use a piece of software or you can use the right hardware.

The software route will involve using a solution that clones or images your drive, there are plenty of those, Carbonite, Ghost, free solutions, paid solutions, but they’re usually a little bit delayed and could affect performance.

Your other option is to set up your drives in a RAID array. There are a few RAID configurations that will clone your drives automatically specifically to help you hold onto your data in case of failure. RAID 1 is the simplest, but there are others like RAID 6 that allow for even more fault tolerance by letting your data survive even more drive failures.

RAID arrays let you backup instantly in the background and since you already plan to have a drive dedicated to that, they seem like the best and easiest solution, and the one we’d recommend.

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