Cloned Drive Different From Source

ericlindellnyc · 08-24-2023, 03:54 AM

Using a Wavlink dual bay drive dock, I cloned an 8 TB HDD offline.
The result shows the drives have identical capacity -- to the byte.

But -- the Source has less used space.
It has more total files.
Please see attached photo with data.

Any idea how to account for the differences?
I'd like to know if my data is fully backed up. Going by the numbers, it isnt.
Unless I'm missing something about purgeable data.
Thanks in advance for any insights.

pan64 · 08-24-2023, 12:21 PM

how did you make that clone?
you might try rsync (in dry run mode) to see the differences.

jailbait · 08-24-2023, 12:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ericlindellnyc

I'd like to know if my data is fully backed up. Going by the numbers, it isnt.

The way to find out if your backup is any good is to try a restore.

You can run into all sorts of fluky errors with cloning hard drives. I suggest that you format the output drive and do your backups with rsync.

Emerson · 08-24-2023, 02:03 PM

Wild guess, different physical sector size. Imaging is the last thing I'd do myself. Once I discovered rsnapshot I never looked back. It is versatile, can be used as a smart copy, or it can interact with remote rsync servers, it uses hard links saving great deal of disk space even if you do frequent backups.
And another thing, it was pointed out in another thread, this may be an SMR drive and those may err under sustained write.