Clone Drive

[Valorie Carlee]

Ihave read through the support forum and also read Headless backup. The Headless backup seems dated as it was done in 2015 and consists of 22 steps and ends up with the image on a data drive. You then have a number of additional steps to burn that image to an external SSD.

I run OMV5 from a 32GB SSD and have recently purchased 2 identical SSDs. I would like to clone the system SSD to each of the backup SSDs. Having read the Clonezilla Live Doc for this disk-to-disk process (consists of 11 steps) I am unable to see how to do it in OMV using the built in version of Clonezilla?

macom Thanks for the list. However your 8 steps only gets to the first step of Clonezilla - then need to complete the next 8 to actually get a backup.

I had already done your steps, at least up to 7, and after getting Clonezilla Live started I ran into the problem of not finding my backup drive listed in the available options.

So now that I have at least one good backup of the OS drive I will follow your steps to see if I can also do the same from Clonezilla Live. More to follow...

So....I connected the computer to a monitor and a keyboard and everything is still the same, it goes directly to clonezilla and doesn't show me the grub menu. Do I have to press any specific key for the menu to appear? Sorry but this is the first time something like this has happened to me.

PS: sorted out. I created a bootable USB with Super Grub2 Disk and selected the grub corresponding to the OMV. Then I entered the OMV page and set the OMV kernel to default, which strangely was already selected but didn't work. I've done this so many times and it's never happened to me, but there's always a first time.

Yep

Take care about the UUID (fstab and Grub part) if you are using partition and done a simple dd.

Have a look there :

[How-To] Restore OMV system backup made with openmediavault-backup plugin

For example, I have Windows 7 on a hard drive where SMART reports "many bad sectors". If I buy a new hard drive, and attempt to clone over Windows to the new hard drive, will that fix the problem so I have Windows on a clean hard drive, or will that also copy over the bad sectors and so therefore SMART will find errors on the new hard drive?

Based on the answers: cloning from a clean drive to a bad-sector drive is fine, data-wise. From a bad-sector drive to a clean drive is also fine. And, the cloning process itself won't destroy any data. The only thing to worry about is if data was lost when the original drive acquired bad sectors.

The actual bad sectors are a property of the physical material in the drive, and are not copied. In other words, if you have ten bad sectors on hard drive A, and five on B, and you clone A onto B, B still has exactly the same five bad sectors that it did before the cloning process.

I would assume that the hard drive itself (or any checkdisk-style process run on the drive) will map those sectors elsewhere so that the cloning software doesn't try to write data to them, but that has no impact on the actual bad sectors present on the drive, and doesn't change the answer to your question.

You do have one problem, however. If the hard drive you're trying to clone has lots of bad sectors on it, then data may have already been lost. So you're probably better off reinstalling anyway, and moving your data over afterward.

Copying means reading from the source and writing to the destination. Bad sectors can not be read, so there is nothing to write to the destination. Most copy utilities will fill in all zeros for sectors they can not read.

One problem you may have is file damage depending on how many unreadable bad sectors you have. You may see some damaged files that have missing data or "holes" in them. There are advanced cloning methods that can identify which files are damaged due to bad sectors.

I currently have a old 1TB SSD Drive with the dropbox folder on it. I'd like to install a new 4 TB drive in my laptop and clone the old drive onto the new larger capacity SSD drive without having to resync and download all of the files again back into the cloned dropbox folder.

This seems like it should be a very normal thing but I can't seem to find enough information on this to make me a bit more comfortable. If I clone the drive completely, then swap them so the drive letter is restored, can I make that work? I found this on another post: "This doesn't work. When you boot up your new drive and start dropbox on it won't recognized the existing "dropbox" folder. It will force you to create a new dropbox folder and proceed to download the entire dropbox content from the cloud. pretty annoying"

Did this post help you? If so, give it a Like below to let us know.

Need help with something else? Ask me a question!

Find Tips & Tricks Discover more ways to use Dropbox here!

Interested in Community Groups? Click here to join!

Thanks for the response. So it sounds like that it will need to download everything from dropbox. Are there instructions for doing this available. I.e. step one, remove the drop box folder, step two, remove your computer from the list of devices, etc,... any FAQ that I should refer to?

If you end up having two Dropbox folders on your computer, what you can do instead is pause the syncing of your desktop app, manually move/copy your files from the old Dropbox folder to the new one and then, resume syncing once again.

That's the process I use for every rebuild and it works flawlessly (did it again just last week for about the 10th time). Just know that the re-indexing will take a while and Dropbox will still appear to be uploading and downloading, but it's just sending the comparison data and any differences it finds. Be patient and LET IT WORK. My Dropbox is about 185 GB and it took the better part of a day to re-index everything.

I have a Dell XPS 8920 (circa 2017) with the Dell OEM 1TB HDD as boot drive (Drive C), and with Optane Memory enabled ("paired" to the boot drive). I also have a second internal drive, 2TB HDD. (Drive D)

I want to replace the 1TB HDD OEM drive with a new 2TB HDD drive, after I clone the OEM drive. (I will temporarily remove the current 2TB "D" drive.)

Assuming that I clone the boot drive while Optane Memory is enabled:

1. Do I need to disable Optane Memory before swapping the drives, or will the system recognize the cloned (2TB) boot drive after the swap?

2. If the system will reboot from the cloned 2TB replacement, will the "Rescan" process pick up the data for the new boot drive?

The multiple Recovery Partitions are the result of either a Windows upgrade operation or an incorrect (IMHO) Windows 10 install (you should always delete all partitions on a drive before letting the Windows 10 installer do its thing). Still, if you are going to clone the drive, you are stuck with these partitions. Make sure that the additional space on the new drive is assigned to your OS partition.

You need to disable Optane before doing anything else. Only then will the contents be flushed to the HDD and the HDD ready for cloning. After cloning and replacing the drive with the new one, you can reenable Optane to accelerate the performance of this new, larger drive.

The 1.12GB partition (end of the drive?) must be the Intel area, but why so big? The 12.9Gb partition must be the Windows Recovery area. If possible, I would like to know what is in those partitions.

I will be using Seagate DiscWizard to perform the cloning operation. It appears to have the capability of resizing partitions during the clone.

Note: My Dell XPS 8920 come with the Intel Optane Memory already enabled. I installed the second internal drive before my first boot. How Drive 0 became "D" and Drive 1 became "C" (boot drive) is a bit of a mystery. All I did was to plug in the cables for the new drive. It works, so that is all that matters. This is the machine where I want to upgrade the boot drive.

I am leery about Windows 11, but I at least want to see it, without messing up my current system, and without that ridiculous ten day Windows 11 test period. If nothing else, I will have a secure, off-computer backup of my boot drive (on the 1TB OEM drive).

From what I have read, Windows 10 has some code that ties it to the motherboard, to keep people from installing illegal copies of Windows. My other computer (Dell Insipron 530, circa 2009. Primarily boots into Windows 7) already has the 'free' copy of Windows 10 on the second internal hard drive, but I almost never boot into that hard drive (changed through BIOS).

You wrote, "The multiple Recovery Partitions are the result of either a Windows upgrade operation or an incorrect (IMHO) Windows 10 install" Windows 10 came pre-installed by Dell when I bought the system. I have no clue why there are so many partitions, or what is in them.

3a8082e126