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Old 11-04-2009, 01:27 AM
themarkus themarkus is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2009
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Archiving old hard drives

Over the years I saved the hard drives from all of my computers. I now have a box full of hard drives that I would like to archive. I would like to create and save exact images (byte for byte) of all my drives.

Because of not always moving files over from old computers and an external hard drive that failed several years ago, I would like to eventually run file recover software on these disk images. It is important that the disk images are perfect clones of the original drives so that erased files may still be recovered.

I have a mixture of internal Windows drives, external Mac drives, and some Iomega Zip disks that I am trying to archive. I can get my Mac to successfully mount all the drives (for the old Windows drives I have to use a USB IDE adapter), and it appears that I could use Disk Utility to create a "New Image" file for each of my drives.

My question is whether Apple Disk Utility images are exact copies that could later be used in conjunction with file recovery software, or if I am better off using a program such as SuperDuper or CCC to make copies of these disks?

I did do some research on archiving hard drives, but found little information about the best way of doing this. I am also not sure if there are problems created when mac programs clone windows disks. I am appreciative of any advice. Thanks in advance for your help.
--Markus
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