What's the best way to mirror multiple laptop drives with Drive Copy?

For Drive Copy 11 Pro:

I have 10 identical laptops with nearly identical configurations. I want to create mirror images of 3 of the 10 drives, and put the mirror images on one external drive (in 3 separate directories). The laptop drives are 500 gb each with 100 gb in use, and the external drive is empty, with 2 tb capacity. It can connect either via USB or external SATA.

My thought is to remove the drives and connect them to my workstation via USB adapter, and mirror them directly onto the backup drive. But the documentation isn't specific about whether this is possible, and the knowledge base doesn't seem to have been updated in 3 years and doesn't even cover version 11. Much of what's in the KB is poorly written and unusable.

In my first attempt at this, Drive Copy showed the backup process was going to take 12 hours, so I aborted.

Any ideas? I'm happy to RTFM if someone can even show me the right place to look.

 

I can't help much other than to ask if you let it run for a while? The time estimates are done by running average and can be wildly off at the beginning. I don't know about Paragon products but I totally ignore any time estimates given at any time with Acronis.

 

Thanks for your response. Maybe I'll try running one of them overnight and see what the time stamp says when I come in the next morning.

Other than that, can I do it the way I mentioned? Is that the best way? I don't want to install the software on each laptop. Even besides license restrictions, it seems inefficient, especially for restoring images. These laptops are used for training, and I want to refresh them when a class is finished.

 

I don't know anything about Drive Copy and am just new to Paragon's Backup and Recovery. You probably can do this with Drive Copy if it will make an image of a partition.

If I were doing it with Backup and Recovery, I would create (if necessary) a second partiton on the each laptop's HD, create an image of the C drive partition and store it in the second partition. You probably could use Paragon Backup Capsule.

After the class I would restore the archived partition to each machine. Probably faster than USB2, you can do all machines at once (no USB drive sharing) and there is anything unique about the machines such as a machine name, software license numbers, etc they stay with the machine. In one of my previous lives I used to run a training group and this is how we did it other than we kept the images on a server. The images were done via Ghost which was in Ghost's very early days, long before Norton bought it and the machines were 386 processors - give you some idea of how long ago that was.

You can copy the images to the USB drive as a backup. I'm assuming you can copy images out of the Paragon Backup Capsule but I don't really know. Often these capsules, secure zones, etc can have a non-standard partition attribute to keep them from being accessed in Windows.

With Backup and Recovery you could write your 3 images to the USB drive. How much problem you would have with any dissimilar hardware remains to be seen but the advertizing seems to indicate the product deals with this but being a new Paragon user, I don't know for sure and how well it does. I've always preferred fresh installs on new hardware.

BTW, you can also use the Paragon Capsule as a tool to create a second partition on a drive with suitable un-used space. Create the Backup Capsule then go into Windows Disk Management and delete the partition it creates. This will leave unallocated space that you can then setup within Windows Disk Management as a regular partition. Did it once and it worked fine.

 

Thanks for your help. I did get it working, and successfully mirrored 4 partitions from both my laptop builds onto my 2 TB external drive. Good advice about Capsule, since there's a lot of unallocated space.

Only problem now is when trying to copy a partition back to the original source, Drive Copy says there isn't free space, while showing the exact space is available. I'll start that as a new thread. Thanks again.