Tubro Backup - Disk Duplication

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Disk Duplication - 10/21/2008

At its simplest, disk duplication could mean simply duplicating a CD or DVD disk via regular CDR/RW or DVDR/RW technology and software. Drop a CD in your CD/ROM drive and another in your CD-R/RW drive, choose copy disk, and the disk duplication job is done in just a few minutes.

Perhaps, as discussed earlier in our disk cloning entry, the process of disk duplication refers to ghosting or cloning a hard drive image, either for backup or migration purposes. Disk duplication, when dealing with removable media, is usually referred to simply as ‘copying a disk’, so we’ll discuss the latter process here. While disk duplication can be facilitated by several software applications, there are some concerns when working in certain environments. Computers that run Windows XP, for example, use a unique identifier known as a security ID (SID), and when using disk duplication software, the administrator must ensure the uniqueness of these SIDs to avoid accidental transmission of permissions through duplicate SIDs. Again in the case of removable media, a duplicate SID might give an account access to files even though NTFS permissions for the account specifically deny access to those files. Also, companies like Microsoft don’t support machines that were setup using SID duplicating tools other than the System Preparation tool. If you are considering disk duplication for data or environment migration, be very sure to check with the OEM software company for information on best practices and caveats to what might seem like a very easy task. If you are looking for the best way to preserve and add redundancy to your critical data stores, contact Remote Backup Systems for an enlightening conversation about online data backup software.