What drive cloning software do you use,Jow Forums?

Context: I work on Windows systems more than anything.

I am quite used to Acronis for shit that I just need to work. I like the _idea_ of clonezilla but I just can't use it day-to-day because of the two below issues:
* Can't clone or restore a 500GB disk with only 100GB in use to any destination smaller than 500GB, which is dumb and Acronis handles without question
* Can't (easily) mount and extract files from the generated archive files from a Windows system.

When I'm really in a pinch for some reason or another, ddrescue is nice if the needed hardware is available and Windows DISM for weird use-cases like hardware RAID or crappy soldered-on SSDs.

dd

again

I like all these faggots talking like dd is the be-all end-all of disk cloning and how l33t they are when it is usually the worst option.

dd across an entire SSD, sector-by-sector when you have limited PE cycles through an SSDs' life. Nice.

dd read/write of say 1TB of total disk read and 1TB total disk write when there's only a small portion of that disk (say not even 250GB) that needs to be transferred. Use an appropriate utility that can read on a filesystem level with permission handling and don't waste time. Get the job done in half the time or less and fail-over to sector-by-sector if you get read errors from the source.

i'd use this but it also copies empty space so it takes forever on large drives

Copy-paste or syncthing

OP said "clone".

You want to clone the fucking platters too?
It's a complete waste to spend time copying over unallocated space that no filesystem is referencing. Just ignore it.

You can't do a true clone of anything yet at a commercial level. Don't turn this into a wordsmith fight.

Actually I'll retract part of this.

It can be useful to copy over that unallocated / unreferenced space in situations where you plan to run testdisk/photorec/others to recover data either for disaster recovery or forensics. THEN it makes complete sense to take everything you can get out of it and maybe take several copies if you suspect the disk is providing faulty data.

Again though this is kinda assuming major disaster. Failed RAID maybe.

Clonezilla is one of the good one's tho but not for the begginers.

dd ( dupe drive )

i actually loved the streaming squashfs method you see here unix.stackexchange.com/a/75590, compressed and mountable on any stock 2.6+ kernel

cat /dev/sdX > /dev/sdY

If you only want files use mv or cp, it should work even for windows hidden files.

Disk Destroyer, hehehe.

In that case I'd use rsync. I don't know how well cp handles permissions, attributes, and file modification times.

HDClone will probably do what you need to do (copy valid data only, will also do bit-by-bit cloning and cloning one to many). Its bootable too. Problem is it's payware unless you pirate, and the free version is extremely limited in function.

>wanting to make a 1:1 copy of your data from a failing disk = hiding something

Attached: literally what.jpg (473x356, 12K)

>i'd use this but it also copies empty space so it takes forever on large drives
It doesn't take forever, if you have brain.
Use as bs the size of your drive's cache.
simple as that.

Absolute idiot.

cp -a

Guess I need to learn how to RTFM.

$ rsync -arthur -P /src/ /dst/

I find it easy to remember and then you get the benefit of rsync doing it's stop/resume/compare operations on the go. It may not be the best switches to use but I've found it works.

Attached: niBBA.jpg (1200x776, 50K)

>$ rsync -arthur -P /src/ /dst/
So many redundant flags. That should just be rsync -auhP /src/ /dst/

I know the flags are redundant but I don't care. Easier to remember.

Clonezilla, it just werks.

>one redundant flag
>so many
kys

Why are people cloning drives in 2018?
What scenario could possibly warrant this?

>Disk becomes defective
>Restore user profile from Active Directory on fresh drive with user folders redirected to cloud storage
>Anyone who does anything else is stupid

I don't want to share my info with microsoft pajeets.

dd if needed
Veeam for backups

Stop using windows 10.

>SSD upgrades
>Offline archive backups that are bootable
>Poor-mans deployment for newly installed systems

I'm the original user who posted -arthur .

It's more than just -r, actually. Because -a is like cp -a, it flips a bunch of different stuff. -a is equivalent to -rlptgoD , so now everything in caps is redundant: aRThuR , leaving as correct, -auhP is perfectly acceptable as well. There, now I've wasted enough time explaining this subject to totally void the time saved by just using -arthur.