Transfer USB image to network share breaks the image.

[J.Cobb]

I've been using Clonezilla for some years now. I work for a rental company that stores PC images on USB drives.

Recently I've been moving all the images to a network share to consolidate the various PC images. But doing so causes the images to fail to restore. At the moment I can't recall the exact error I'm getting but Clonezilla fails to mount the temporary image from the network share. As such I have to either continue to use the USB image or go through all the different PCs we have and re-image them via the network. This is rather time consuming.

I was curious to know if there's a way to fix the USB image so I can copy it to a network share and restore it via the same.

I use a number of high capacity (2-4 TB) USB drives to store all the images. I want to transfer them to my Ubuntu Linux Samba server. Connecting and using the server works great in most respects except when I try to restore from the "copied" USB image.

I've done a quick search to try to find this topic. I'm surprised I haven't seen it.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff

[Steve Garcia]

If you're using a linux server, why are you trying to transfer using samba? I went the other direction -- I started by using my linux server as the repository, but switched to using USB drives because 3 USB drives have more bandwidth than a single gigabit ethernet connection, and I can image a classroom full of computers much more quickly this way.

But no matter -- what I did when I used the network repository was connected via ssh. Clonezilla supports that seamlessly (using sshfs), and I never had any trouble with the integrity of the images.

This isn't a solution to the specific problem you're having -- I have no idea why samba would have trouble mounting, but it's an alternative that you might try.

[J.Cobb]

When I use clonezilla to save and restore to the network it works fine.

The problem is when I copy a USB image to the network then try to restore from it via the network. It fails.

Jeff

[J.Cobb]

Steve,

You may be correct about going the other way, which seems to work for images I created via samba in the first place.

I've still a lot of USB images for various Windows machines I'd like to put on the network. But that doesn't seem to work.

Jeff