OK, got lots of good options. The one that saved the day this time was he first one i tried after EASUS. Macrium had a Free trial of their Server version and it worked
Best of all, it even worked as a HOT clone so the server stayed on line th whole time. Now that i have a working clone on a NEW 2TB drive, i can upgrade from MSDE to SQL Express which was the only problem, we had hit the 2GB limit. But I can tell you this, I am going to try out every version of every program mentioned here because the absolute WORST feeling an IT or DB Farm Mgr can have is when he finds a drive failure on a system with no backup
. Even a Data backup is next to worthless if you count the hours to reconfigure.
I do have one question that someone may have the answer to.
When you clone a drive it becomes a bit-copy of the original. I have never seen any of these programs make a huge issue about immediately removing the cloned drive before restarting the sytem and i have always wondered just how risky it could be to have two pf the exact same files on what appears to the system to be the same "location" on two different drive letters
Being a safe rather than sorry type, I always disconnect one of them but i can see so places where being able to leave both connected might come in handy. If the intent is to keep the main drive "lean and mean" but you did not want to toss out files hat go added, i eventhink Macrium or EASUS offers some way to make a sort of incremental backup so that you could have an actual up to date "cloned drive" even months down the road with changes to the main drive being propagated to the cloned drive on a delayed basis
Anyway, for time bing Macrium gets my vote for "getting the Job done" in an easy to see and descriptive manner.