Cloning disks

[richmond62]

So, I decided to clone one of my several ACEPC boxes running Xubuntu with my ESL programs set up the way I like it to 9 other ACEPC boxes.
-

smallThing.jpg (4.32 KiB) Viewed 98 times

-
Sounded groovy until I realised that I had forgotten how to do that.

Poked around on the internet and came up with a Live, Minimalist system called FoxConn . . . but, NBG as could not 'see' the SSD cards in the ACEPC boxes.

So, to Clonezilla . . . downloaded on a Mac, bunged on a USB Flash Drive with BalenaEtcher . . .

https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php (I chose the Debian based stable version).

https://etcher.balena.io/

1. I cloned my source system onto a free-floating disk in a nifty docking station.

2. Connected my docking station, my USB stick with Clonezilla to my target computer, pressed F2 to bring up the BIOS, set the USB stack as boot target1, and the thing started up with Clonezilla (nice to see something made in Taiwan).

3. The clone took about 18 minutes.

4. Set Clonezilla to power off at the end of the cloning process.

5. Disconnected the docking station and the USB stack.

6. Booted up the target with F2 to make sure it would boot from the cloned system.

Wonderful!

[tperry2x]

Yup, mentioned this before. It also works for Windows and MacOS too. As overclockedmind rightly said, backups are only good if you can prove they are valid (and I do agree, as otherwise they are just wasted disk space), but you can see this approach does indeed work. Rescuezilla has a nicer interface than clonezilla by the way, and simplifies the process greatly. The best thing is that Rescuezilla and Clonezilla backup images are largely interchangeable.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Clonezilla and Rescuzilla is good for cloning disks.

You can also do a block copying to disk image with the 'dd' command on Linux (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html) and macOS has dd too (https://ss64.com/mac/dd.html).
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-cr ... d-command/
I've used dd for some obscure purposes like certain devices that require a 32k block size, and also for 'flashing ROM' (really an SDCard) for Raspberry Pi.