The gatekeeper of reality is quantified imagination.
Project "Clone"
Purpose
The purpose of this project is to clone a hard drive inside of a netbook (or laptop). Hard drives do fail. If you've purchased a lot of software delivered electronically and conducted a lot of configuration/customization of applications, it would be wise to have a good recovery strategy. While there are a lot of solutions out there, I prefer cloning the primary hard drive after I've installed the significant applications I want on it and then using a separate USB incremental backup drive (to store changes after the clone has been performed).
Luckily, there is one piece of hardware available on the commercial market that allows you to clone a hard drive as long as you have a USB 2.0 slot (which I show below in action). However, hardware is only one piece of the cloning puzzle. The other two parts you need are (1) a hard drive of the same size and preferrably same model, and, (2) a software application capable of doing an exact clone. I've already conducted the research into software as well and have included it below.
Hardware: Vantec, NexStar Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock; Model NST-D200SU. You can get the device from CyberGuys.
Software (for Windows 7 Ultimate): Acronis True Image Home 2011. You can get the software from Acronis.
As you can see, I've got my clone hard drive in the hardware device so I can clone the hard drive in the netbook.
The good thing about the hard drive dock is that you can put in different sized hard drives and access applications or data on them (depending on how the appliations are configured), in the same manner as you would with an external hard drive or flash drive.
