Cloning external drive

eco_bach · 02-25-2020, 08:57 AM

I have an external 2TB NTFS formatted drive that needs cloning.
What is the quickest (and reliable) method to accomplish this?

bazio101 · 02-25-2020, 09:44 AM

I've tried clonezilla a few times in the past with success. Both disk2disk and disk2file (and the opposite).
You can also try dd command (with care).

beachboy2 · 02-25-2020, 09:52 AM

eco_bach,

Another vote for Clonezilla:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...o-image-38106/

binkyd · 02-25-2020, 05:05 PM

Haven't tried cloning with it, but it's supposed to do that:
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The disks also stay relatively cool in this rig.

mrmazda · 02-25-2020, 07:49 PM

Clone it to where, another external? Clonezilla isn't needed if all you're interested in is a true clone, e.g.

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc

If the source external is flaky, substitute ddrescue, to maximize probability of reading problem sectors:

Code:

ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Richard.Stone · 02-26-2020, 11:46 AM

I've used dd for many a cloning job, as mrmazda posted above. As long as the destination drive isn't too small for the actual data on the source drive, you can even clone to a smaller drive, then fix the partition size and adjust the filesystem size afterwards, though it's slightly cleaner to resize the source partition to fit the destination with gparted beforehand, if that's the case.