Here's something I've been looking for for a long time. I actually searched for it and proposed it to a couple programmers, but nobody wanted to run with it.
I'm a compulsive backup-ist. I've lost too much stuff due to Windows crashes not to click Save every few minutes or whenever I've done anything I value. I use my local drive for everything for speed, otherwise I'd be waiting a few seconds for every save, hudreds of times a day. Then at the end of the day I write all changes to a different physical drive, a network drive or another PC.
What I want is an "X-Drive" that Windows sees as a drive and can save to, so I get my keyboard and mouse back right away, but in the background it is writing to several places in sequence. First to my local drive, then to the network drive, etc. All it would take is a little buffering and scheduling. Shouldn't be hard. When I try to read from the X-drive I could be prompted as to which physical drive's copy I want.
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Isn't this just a complicated way of describing the function of a RAID array?
As the above poster said, RAID-1 arrays do this by definition. They are two identical, mirrored copies of your data. If one drive dies, the other one still works and has your stuff.
Any programmer who didn't know about RAID arrays must not have been a programmer/into computers for very long.
My computer has a "virtual X-drive" already- a CD burner that I use to back up files; it helps that I have an 80 GB HD, rather large for this 6 yo Celeron puter. I also have a couple of USB devices the computer "sees" as drives that can be used for portable storage.
I agree this is something that is necessary and can be done with additional hardware like RAID or with redirection software.. But it should have been part of the function of windows explorer in the first place. Create a virtual "location" (file folder or drive) then whatever files you copy into it or make any modifications in, it is mirrored to as many number of physical drives that you have specified.
Yeah read up on RAID arrays. It's been a while since I've worked with one, but I believe that you have to have two of the exact same hard drives. Newer SATA interfaces make it easy to set up RAID nowdays.