clone ssd boot disk

attend · 2022-12-04T18:23:04+00:00

My respberry pi 4 is currently booting from a 128G ssd disk thourgh usb and everything is fine. I just got a spare 120G ssd disk and I'm going to use it as a backup disk in case the current running one got problem.As the 120G ssd is not the same size and brand as the 128G one, I couldn't use dd to clone whole disk. Then I did it manually by copying boot partion and root partion to the 120G disk partitions seperately. I've also changed the disk identifier in /etc/fstab and cmdline.txt to match the 120G disk, but it won't boot.I couldn't find any useful information in the website, any suggestion woul be greately appreciated.

Dec 04, 2022 Last reply: 3 years ago 25 Replies

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druck 3 years ago

That is a possibility with certain software, so proceed with caution and always check that your backuped files are identical to the originals

*BEFORE* you need to restore from it.

However in practice, there are few problems with this approach. Particularly as frequently changing files such the contents of caches are best excluded from incremental backups, and recreated when needed.

I have dozens of large sqlite databases which are receive updates during backups, and have not suffered any corrupted, verified by checking against remote replicated copies.

---druck

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Ahem A Rivet's Shot 3 years ago

Don't try it with a real database server.

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Anssi Saari 3 years ago

That was clear but what I said also stands. Take one 128 GB drive, resize the file system(s) on it so that they take up at most 120 GB of the drive and dd away. dd will error out when the smaller drive is full but it doesn't matter since everything contained in the file system(s) was copied at that point.

I can see someone else proposed this as well so it shouldn't be a radical concept. Tools to resize common file systems have been around for a few decades now.

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The Natural Philosopher 3 years ago

You can get away with it on a database server using C-ISAM files provided its relatively quiescent.

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Jim Jackson 3 years ago

the -x option you quoted stops it cross filesystems - so no need to exclude /dev /proc /sys etc

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Nikolaj Lazic 3 years ago

True. I've done that few times. On different architectures. Worked every time. It should even be faster than rsync if one has lamost full partition.

Or he could resize it to the size a bit over the size used in that partition, copy... and than resize to the full size of the partition. Much faster than rsync.

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