No drive mirroing in XP, no problem

So I had a total system crash. I had two hard drives die on me a motherboard act screwy and I think it was all the power supply. So now that I have replaced all the parts I decided not to go with the on board SATA RAID (As that was the first thing to fail on my last setup). Having used software drive mirroring in NT 4.0 for years I figured W2K was descended from NT and XP is a W2K descendant therefore XP should have drive mirroring.

WRONG!

Though you will find all of the instructions to mirror a drive in the Windows help files, you will also find that you can only use said functionality in the Server flavors of Windows.

So now I was left with finding a way to do this my self. I could have attempted to write something myself, buy a commercial product or find some one else that has done it. I chose the last option.

After some brief research I went with Karen's Replicator. The product, which runs as PTReplicator.exe, can be scheduled to run at various intervals. Once a day seemed to work well for me.

It mirrored my 6 GB of data in only a few minutes. Even better as the software only replaces files that have changed it will run even faster from now on.

The only improvement I would like to see in the product (besides being moved to something other than VB6) is an interface to the windows scheduler (or as a windows service) as the software needs to be running, minimized is ok, to perform the mirroring. I am thinking I can use the scheduler to run the software without having to be logged in.

But as I did not write it, and am too lazy/busy to create on myself, I must recommend it to anyone that needs it's functionality.