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Is there an application that will do a short image copy of a USB drive to another USB drive? I need something that doesn't run off a live cd

Nick
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  • Is this to copy files from drive a to drive b, or copy an image of drive a to drive b? There's an important difference. Otherwise a dd command should work. And what do you mean by short? Fast? – Bart Silverstrim Jun 28 '10 at 16:32
  • I want to do a bit-by-bit copy, and maybe you heard of it as a smart copy? Basically it would copy only the blocks that are being used by the files, and ignore the rest of the drive – Nick Jun 28 '10 at 17:19
  • What filesystem will your USB drive have? Most **short image copy** applications must be aware of how the filesystem stores things. – Zoredache Jun 28 '10 at 17:57
  • they'll be either FAT or FAT32 – Nick Jun 28 '10 at 18:03

1 Answers1

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If you have access to linux you can probably do this in Gparted or from the CLI

dd if=/dev/? of=driveimage.bin

then to copy the image to the device

dd if=driveimage.bin of=/dev/?

with ? being the USB device. Just think if = "input file" of = "output file" dd will do a dump of the raw data on the device, including the partition tables.

for windows this might work XXClone

Chris Disbro
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  • I was thinking about this, but this does the whole drive, not just the blocks that are being used. – Nick Jun 28 '10 at 17:20