Cloning multiple hard drives to one external hard drive?

[Jawnskeel]

Just got a WD elements external drive, 120GB. My father has two computers at his business, and he has not backed them up. A failure of one of the computers means he wouldn't be able to perform day-to-day operations, so a clone of the hard drives is vital.

So I did a little bit of googling, but there isn't one freeware solution that people recommend. I've partitioned it into two equally sized, 55GB partitions. The hard drives that are to be backed up are both 40GB. Anyone know which software is best for cloning the hard drive? I'm comfortable with using command line if need be.

 

[Jayce]

For small single operations I use Clonezilla LiveCD. It's not command line based, but it is text user interface based, so it looks kind of old school. It works great, though.

If you want to get crazy and set up a dedicated box for this, FOG (Linux based, requires a Linux install and a stand-alone computer to act as a server) could do the trick too.

I'd start small with Clonezilla LiveCD and if you want something heavier duty, check out FOG. I use both almost daily. Both are free/open source as well.

As with anything else, do a ton of testing on a practice machine so you get the feel of it. It sounds like this data is critical, so don't use a production machine as your guinea pig to feel out the software.