I am seeking some help and advice about cloning the HDD in my Ubuntu server. I have always used Clonezilla to clone the systems disk in my Windows box. I find it very reliable simple and straightforward to use. I have not however until today cloned my server. One of the reasons is that it is in an out of the way place and it is a bit of a hassle to have to pull it out. Today however I decided to clone the server HDD from a 500 GB drive to 1 TB drive.

Here are the details of the server and backup case.

IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre MT-M 8215 -dig and external dual CD case (non-RAID) connected with USB 2. Clonezilla Live version dated Mar 27 2013

When I clone my Windows machine which also has a 500 GB drive it only takes about half an hour certainly not more than 45 minutes. However the Linux boxes giving some problems it is telling me that the cloning time is > 50 hours and that is after it is been running for nearly an hour.

Can anyone see why this would be taking so long, which is impractical. I can see using a different file system could give a different rate of transfer. The other thing I need to consider is if the USB2 connection is too slow and should I invest in a caddy connected with either USB 3 or eSATA which I presume are available.

Robert…

never used clonezilla for anything like that i just DD.

USB 2.0 is considerably slower then 3.0, but does the server that contains your Ubuntu have 3.0?

also are you doing this as a backup, or to just increase the size of the HDD on the server? if it is the later you might be better off putting a fresh instal then rsyncing the data between the 2 drives internally. that would be both faster and cleaner.

you might also consider rsync.

one thing to keep in mind is that this is a server, so if it is active and performing tasks while you are trying to clone the data, that could put a damper on performance.

Clonezilla tries to copy file by file. If your filesystem isn't able to be mounted by Clonezilla it might fall back to dd or bit by bit copy. I forget how to find out what it is doing. Maybe simple mount command? Other tools ought to help.

Generally things like disk access, usb speed and compression issues and even available ram affect how fast this operation is going.

Could be a bug in the version. Might just test redobackup to see how long it takes. Maybe gparted and copy partition to test speed also. The forums on clonezilla my offer clues also. Maybe some boot time option to force some setting or speed. Some ram or to ram issue going on.

So normally it would take 30 min and now it takes 50 hours ? That doesn't sound good. I would perhaps run a SMART long test after it is done to make sure none of the disks are failing.

Thank you everyone for your replies I have got everything sorted out. I finally took the drives over to my other machine and use dd. The reason I use the other machine was because I could connect the drive's using SATA and therefore getting the maximum throughput. Is still took about 4 1/2 hours so I was up fairly late last night. I did have a look at Clonezilla and it reported a copying time of seven hours.

I think jefro was correct as at when I use Clonezilla to clone a Windows disk it must do it file by file but when it comes to my Linux disk it was doing it bit by bit. Anyway everything is all back up and running.

Thank you everyone for your help.