Enter the HP Z820

[Tom Daigon]

Hi Alex, agnostic is good. It leaves you open minded to different ways to do things. Minor variations, but the unknown can be annoying at times.

Once Im in Premiere or After Effects all is familiar.

Even on day 2 I feel oriented and more comfortable. But Im glad I have the forums , HP and my VAR (Safe Harbor Computers) to get help from if I need it.

Should start a personal project soon to see how it rockets. 😀

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64gigs ram
Caligit HD Pro 2 16TB.

[Michael Murphy]

Tom,

Whenever I build a new machine, I clone a copy of the main (OS) hard drive for emergency use.

I have a bunch of older 160GB hard drives around, so I create a copy on one of those. If I have free slots in the machine, I leave the HDD unplugged and labelled right in the machine.

Just in case a hard drive crashes, or something flaky happens, or I just want to totally restage a machine to a clean start point with all of my setting (background color set, drivers, etc.)

I also write up a “build sheet” of the build process, applications installed, and all settings, in case I want to manually restage it.

I never use that for most machines – I found the drive 3 years later in one machine and couldn’t figure out what it was for!

But it is nice to have for a production machine, where you might have to just restart and keep going to get a jop done, rather than spend time futzing with hardware.

I know I tend to restage my laptops about once per year to get rid of all of the accumalted bookmarks, e-mail, trial applications, pictures, etc. etc. that start to build up (after backing them up of courcse. I have one 3GB external drive with the contents of 5 or more lattops, going back 10 years.)

Cheers! Have fun! Envious …

Best,
Michael

Best,
Michael

[Tom Daigon]

Michael, when you clone the drive what software do you use. I bought Paragon since lots of folks had good things to say about it.

The clone you make is bootable right? And I assume you are talking about PCs in your post.

What do you mean by “restage”.

I was under the impression that I needed to use Paragon to make an image of my Main Drive to a Copy (an extenal USB 3 drive I bought), and also create a boot disk with Paragon. Then if the system crashed due to non mechanical reasons, I then used the boot drive to allow me to use the copy to restore the Main Drive.

The process you describe is similar to the approach I used on the Mac. I used Super Duper to make a bootable clone to an external drive. Then if the Main drive crashed, I could boot up on the external and if desired copy all its info back to the Main Drive, or a new one I might replace it in the machine.

Please give me a detailed step by step desciption of your process.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64gigs ram
Caligit HD Pro 2 16TB.

[Walter Soyka]

Tom, I use Acronis True Image which allows you to clone a drive (like Super Duper) or image the drive (as it sounds like you have done here)

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Tom Daigon]

From my research I deduce that Acronis and Paragon are capable of the same functions.Is that your understanding?

Since I have Paragon I hope to make that work.

If you clone a drive on the PC are there issues with Windows only allowing you to do it a certain amount of times?

I need a better grasp of which process is better , cloning or imaging.
And why I would do one as opposed to the other.

It was much simpler on the Mac 😀

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64gigs ram
Caligit HD Pro 2 16TB.

[Walter Soyka]

Windows checks your current hardware configuration against the configuration it was activated on to make sure you’re not trying to copy it illegally. The worst case scenario for a cloned drive in the same hardware is that Windows will ask you to re-activate and may require a quick call to the Microsoft activation hotline.

That said, my clone boots just fine and does not de-activate.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Tom Daigon]

Thats what I needed to know. I will have to delve into the Paragon Readme soon to get the details on the clone process. It seems so much easier then making an image disk AND a boot disk.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64gigs ram
Caligit HD Pro 2 16TB.

[John Frey]

We use a StarTech standalone hard drive duplicator dock to clone the system drives in our edit workstations. This unit does not have to be hooked to a computer to do a bit-for-bit clone. It talks to ESata and USB (the newer model to USB3, and can act as an external drive dock as well. We purchased new drives to match our system drives. Our computer cases allow quick access to a system drive, and we let the StarTech do it’s thing overnight, then file the updated clone on a shelf. One of our edit bays lost a system drive recently, and quick swap to it’s clone had us up an running in a few minutes. The StarTech also clones 2.5″ laptop drives.

John D. Frey
25 Year owner/operator of two California-based production studios.

Digital West Video Productions of San Luis Obispo and Inland Images of Lake Elsinore

[Tom Daigon]

John thanks for the info. I dont think that will work for my HP Z820 system since it has its own style of drives that that might be unique to its easy access design.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64gigs ram
Caligit HD Pro 2 16TB.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Tom Daigon] “I dont think that will work for my HP Z820 system since it has its own style of drives that that might be unique to its easy access design.”

It doesn’t. There are only two “styles” of drives used on Z-series (and elsewhere) – SAS and SATA. If your Z uses SATA, they are compatible with any solutions outlined above. SAS – only with some (and usually not with stand-alone duplicators).

Windows activation – not an issue: HP (like Dell, Lenovo, etc.) uses Microsoft’s machine-specific activation routine, i.e. you can install HP flavor of Windows a zillion times on various hard drives (cloned or not), it’ll never deactivate.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA