Duplicate of a harddrive

(I hope software is the right place for this question, it seems more of a software question, even though it's dealing with hardware.)

I have an external 1.5TB drive that I have my entire iTunes library on, and I almost lost it last week during a power outage. I have the stuff that I've purchased from the itunes store backed up, but the rest of it is not, and I've put a lot of the dvds that we own on there, so we can watch on AppleTV.

So now I purchased two 2TB external HD and transfered the library from the troubled drive to one of the new ones, and I want to use the other new one as a back up of the first new one.

My question is: I don't really want to do a "backup" with it in Apple's backup system files, I just want it to be an actual duplicate of the drive. So in other words, if the first new drive were to fail, I just take the second drive, point iTunes in it's direction, and use it, with no restoring. What is the most efficient way to do this? Is there software native to OS X in which I can do this (I tried backup, but didn't see where I could duplicate the drive), or do I need to buy additional software to do this?

Thanks in advance for any help

You either need to invest in a RAID box which will automatically create 2 identical drives or backup software.

On the software side, I recommend SuperDuper!. The paid version will do incremental backups.

bobtomay said:

You either need to invest in a RAID box which will automatically create 2 identical drives or backup software.

On the software side, I recommend SuperDuper!. The paid version will do incremental backups.

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Thanks for your help and your fast response.

Tell me about the RAID box, I've heard the term a lot, but never really looked into details about what it is. I know essentially it is powered storage bays for internal hard drives, but what other technical functions does it serve?

When I bought the new HDs earlier this week I kind of briefly looked at RAIDs, because right now I have 7 different HDs stacked up on my desk (to go along with the 4 internals I have in my Mac Pro). It would be nice to cut down on some of them, but honestly right now, I have other priorities for my cash than HD storage. Right now my other hobby is taking precedence financially, and am not spending a lot on my Mac. When I do spend money on my mac, more memory (I'm terribly sluggish) and a new monitor will be my first spend.

So I think for now anyway, I'm going to go with the software, I took a look at it and it looks like exactly what i need.

For what you're wanting just for those 2 drives, a RAID 1 (mirrored) set up is what you're looking for - something like this. A mirrored solution writes everything simultaneously to both drives, producing 2 identical drives - thus automatic backup.

With the number of external drives you have, you might want to check out something like the Drobo line up also.