Independant imaging solution

[Tranquil Hegemo]

I have just purchased an Icy Dock along with a Samsung 850 240GB driven and also a Hyper X 120GB drive. I have after a few moments of discomfort getting the BIOS booting from the new drive (Gigabyte seem to put new drives at the end of the boot chain regardless of which sata port is connected to) I successfully transferred the OS drive across to the new Samsung 850 and got it booting. Anyway I now have the OS on the above Samsung, a user files partition on a Samsung 840 240GB (E:\) and all my music files etc on a 1TB WD spinner (F:\).

This leaves me with 2 x Hyper X 120GB drives which I want to use as weekly rotating backup drives but the plan is that they will never be "live" unless I move them to a specific slot in the Icy Dock so I am seeking some information on the best way to achieve this.

What I would like to do is as follows:

1. Make each of the Hyper X drives bootable so that I can shutdown the PC, move one of the drives to a connected slot in the Icy Dock and then select that drive at bootup so that it will launch the backup software and backup all of the drives to that specific backup drive. I am pretty sure that this is doable by creating a small bootable partition on each of the backup drives but if someone can confirm this it would be appreciated

2. The next question that I would like answering is the best method of creating an "image" of the C: F: & G: drives - I did a straight image of the C: drive to copy across to the new Samsung but this was 11GB (out of 37.9GB used of a 120GB SSD) so is there a better way to do this? Also does the above change if the drive is the OS drive or a data drive? Should also add that the used drive space is as follows:

C: 37.9GB \ 232.8GB
E: 8.7GB \ 232.8GB (yep it's a waste of a good drive but hey ho)
F:\ 48.9GB \ 931.5GB

3.Lastly what software would you recommend (preferably free) to do the above? I used Redo Backup Live to perform the move of the C: drive and while I like its simplicity (simple GUI, limited options etc) is is too simple for what I would like to achieve which is an option where I plug in the backup drive and it does the backup of all three drives without further user input and that's it. Compression would also be nice albeit dependent on the answers to the second question...

I have no doubts that there will be further questions but I will throw those above out there for now and step back for a while.

 

[Layback Bear]

I think I know what you are trying to do but your post is confusing.

Your backup do not need to be bootable.

I use HotSwap bays which is basically the same thing you want to do.

The first thing I do with my back up ssd is label it as such in My Computer.
(Back Up #1 C partition)
I do this so what ever slot I install the ssd, what ever partition letter Windows gives it I know what it is.
Plus some 3rd party backup programs can call the same drive/partition something else. Naming each partition is very helpful.

It will look something like this.




Because I have the same problem with a Asus motherboard (UEIF) moving drive numbers around when install HotSwap drives I must name each partition to keep track of them. That is why Disk #1 has each partition Named.

I use Macrium Reflect to do back up and I also use built in Windows 7 back ups.
That is why you see the different names of partition.

Now comes the easy part. When booted into Windows 7 and select backup you just select the drive you want to backup and select the destination.

In Macrium you can select which partition/s you want backed up and then select the destination. (Remember you have already given the destination a Name.)

If you want your back up to be bootable you can us Macrium and do a Clone of the complete drive with the C partition included.

Here is a tutorial by WHS with a video that will explain even better than I can.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html

It's actually easier than my explanation of how I do it.

The big key is name each partition so you can tell one from the other. Which also helps if you want to delete a partition. Many of people have deleted a partition and drives because they couldn't tell one from the other.