Cloning an external USB drive to another external USB drive

[StevenDenenberg]

Hi,
I have a 2TB external USB drive that I want to duplicate. It's about full, with gazillions and gazillions of files.
I'm using xxcopy to copy everything, but it looks like it will take weeks, and xxcopy complains of issues of path lengths, etc.

Is this something that HDD Raw Copy tool can do better, and much faster? Is it much faster to do a raw copy as described for that tool, rather than having xxcopy or robocopy identify every single file and copy them over?

Sorry if the question is a little naive!
Thanks, --Steve

[HaQue]

if the drives are the same size, better to do a disk image and write image to the other drive. something like Clonezilla(free) will do it, or a myriad of other tools.
IMHO, copying that much data at once puts the drive under stresses different than normal use. I have seen the new drives die during copy operations this big.

[StevenDenenberg]

Thanks. Is it possible to do something that doesn't require the intermediate step? Would a sector-by-sector copy rather than an all-the-files-copy do it?

[HaQue]

I believe clonezilla does that. or dd, you could probably find a sample command line for dd on the web somewhere that will clone a drive to another, actually this is probably the best util for that, but I am comfortable with clonezilla, as I use it to image networks very often.

If using clonezilla, I always use the bootable CD and ONLY have the drives plugged in that I am working with, so I cant make a mistake. I check the drives that are reported carefully and make sure I know which is the actual source and target. check thrice, cut once, as they say in woodwork.

[fzabkar]

Just make sure that the target drive reports the same sector size. Some USB enclosures (2TB+) are configured with 4KB sector sizes.