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Duplicate External Drives

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2008-08-02
2013-04-05
  • Clinton Blackburn

    I have a master USB/FireWire drive and a bunch of clean drives of the same brand/size. I would like to duplicate the master drive to the others in a manner more efficient that using Windows' explorer and dragging/dropping the files.

    Can CloneZilla be used to do this? If so, how? If not, can anyone recommend a method/software to do this?

     
    • Steven Shiau

      Steven Shiau - 2008-08-02

      Yes.
      1. Boot clonezilla live CD
      2. After you select language and keyboard layout, insert the source USB flash drive.
      3. Choose to save it as an image in local filesyste, SSHFS or whatever writable place
      4. When everything is done, enter command line prompt, then type "exit" to return the main menu, insert the target USB flash drive, now you can choose to restore the image.

      This is the basic idea, not step-by-step, but I think you can make it.
      Good luck.

       
      • Clinton Blackburn

        Thanks for your response. I have no problem cloning a single drive. What I need is a method to duplicate the drive simultaneously to multiple USB/FireWire drives. Essentially I want to do a broadcast or multicast over USB or FireWire. Is this possible with CloneZilla, or any software for that matter?

         
        • Steven Shiau

          Steven Shiau - 2008-08-02

          Then you clonzilla server edition (DRBL)
          http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-server-edition/

          There is DRBL live (testing and unstable), too:
          http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-live/

           
          • Clinton Blackburn

            Are you saying that CloneZilla server allows deployment to multiple drives connected directly to the server? The external drives are not connected to individual computers, but directly to the server via USB/FireWire. Looking through the documentation, I can't find any mention of this feature.

            Also, I have installed the server and cannot find an option to create/restore a local image.

             
            • Steven Shiau

              Steven Shiau - 2008-08-03

              In that case, you do not need to use Clonezilla server edition. What you have to do is follow the "green" prompt shown in Clonezilla live (1.1.0-8) when you restore the image, change the parameters, save it as a script to run it. For example, you can run the commands in different consoles:
              1. console 1 (i.e. press ctrl-alt-F1)
                 /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-sr -g auto -c -r -p true restoredisk "sarge-r5-sda" "hda"
              2. console 2 (i.e. press ctrl-alt-F2)
                 /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-sr -g auto -c -r -p true restoredisk "sarge-r5-sda" "hdb"
              ...
              You have 6 consoles you can use.
              I think this should work. If not, please let me know.

               
              • Clinton Blackburn

                Steven, thanks so much for your help. I forgot to mention that we need to duplicate about 200GB of data. Is it possible to copy the data directly from the drive without having to make an image?

                Again, thanks for your help. I have been searching for a solution to this problem for quite a while.

                 
                • Steven Shiau

                  Steven Shiau - 2008-08-04

                  Yes, you can choose to do disk to disk clone. An "green" prompt will also prompt you how to run the command "ocs-onthefly".

                   

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