I have two self builts, and had plenty of hard drives (don't ask) so when I was building most folks gave me advice to set them up in RAID for redundancy in case of disk failure. Well, I couldn't figure out how to do it, so now, a year later, I'm worried about disk failure.

Is Windows backup a good enough alternative?? It won't do what I want, but will it at least protect your stuff?

Here's what I want. I want to be able to make a copy of my D: drive. So that if the D: drive fails, all I have to do is replace it with the copy. Nothing else, and everything was exactly the same as if my drive hadn't failed.

Is that possible?? (assuming disk drive space, which I have)? If the disk failure is my system disk (C: drive) I feel okay about that with my recovery image disks I've got, and then it would just be a matter of updating system stuff. I mean I wish I could do the same for that, but I'm guessing outside of RAID I can't??? In other words, if the C drive fails just flip a copy in there, and the system boots up as if nothing happened, no other action required. I assumed that was possible with a RAID setup, but maybe assumed wrong.

Sorry for my ignorance here again, but I guess I don't understand the technical details behind hard drives and backing them up. Could some of you good folks who've helped me before help yet again???

Macrium Reflect is a nice piece of software if you want to clone entire hard drives as backups in case of failure. It also has some other features for creating recovery images and whatnot (similar to Windows backup).

Easeus and Clonezilla are other free options for cloning drives..

That looks interesting, thank you very much. I'm going to give the free version a look at. The standard version sounded interesting because instead of recovering an entire disk you could choose to only recover files or folkers, but I'm pretty sure you can already do that with Windows backup, right? So for me to get the ability to that, I wouldn't need the standard version.

But I like the clone thing. The thing I'm still unclear on is the exact steps to take after a failure. As I said, what I'd like ideally is D drive fails, I simply unhook the D drive, hook up the other d drive, boot up and things are as if nothing ever happened. And I'm not sure this is doing that. Maybe nothing will, but I always assumed that's what RAID did, so perhaps I was wrong on that. But I just couldn't follow all the steps I read to set up a RAID set, and so didn't even try.

Anyway, thanks again very much.

If you've cloned the hard drive to another before failure, then essentially it works in the manner you hope - remove old drive, insert cloned one (or if you have both connected, just change the boot priority in BIOS). I've personally never had to replace a failed drive in this manner (hope I don't jinx my luck so far), but yea that's how it's supposed to work.

There are some helpful tutorial videos on youtube as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0PyZIqecII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTl3NbyO6cM Cheers! :)

Oh yes, this is exactly what I want, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. That video was a great help, and answered my questions and gave me the confidence to do it myself.

If I could give you +100 I would. THANKS