My life in code and photos recently approached half a Terabyte, the limit of my USB external drive. Now with an HD dashcam the brink was in sight, so I purchased a 3TB drive on sale at Fry's for $80. I wanted a bit for bit duplicate of the old drive on the new one.
NO FEAR. My first concern was the new drive is USB 3.0 and the old drive was 2.0. Not to worry, that just means the 2.0 will be the slowness in the bottleneck factoring. They are perfectly compatible in the eyes of the Pi and most other controller devices. USB 3.0 is an investment in the future. This 3TB drive is my first USB
3.0 device. It powers solely from the Pi3+ and the Pi Zeros will be able to connect with OTB to OTB USB cable (and my Android phone and dashcam dump) according to plan, just not as fast as the drive is able. An other concern was transfer software, what would make an identical copy? Several answers were researched on the Google query "bit for bit disk copy" later refined to "bit for bit disk copy in Linux command line". The simplest and most powerful choice was the linux console command:dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda &
See $> dd --help for details dd, disk duplicate if, input file, or other source in this case the unmounted b drive of, output file, or other destination in this case the unmounted a drive the drives were determined by order of attachment and the names were determined by the command line 'fdisk ?l'
Which suited me fine as my Win PC is heavily burdened with other tasks and my two Puppy Linux laptops are busy loaded with hundreds of SeaMonkey browser pages, which tend to spike the processor load, locking up keyboard and mouse and occasionally requiring manual restart - too flaky for the immediate task at hand. However, there are two unburdened Raspberry Pi Zeros waiting for an assignment and a Faspberry Pi 3+ running background CHRON scripts and finishing up an online class 'Teaching Physical Computing with Raspberry Pi and Python' from Raspberry Pi Foundation on FutureLearn.com and SSH in from the Puppy to the Pi3 was the best choice, its quad core was speedier than the Pi0's and the 'dd' command task runs in the background undisturbed at 20% CPU and 0.1% memory. It's merrily zooming along dumping the old drive into the new as we speak.
References: Clone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD
How To Clone An Internal Linux Partition To An External USB Disk Using DD
The Best Disk Cloning App for Linux
g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs
What I learned: dd can be both a powerful and potentially dangerous command when ill considered.
Mistakes I made: The good news was that I made this minor mistake which was quite unrelated to the disk duplication via SSH on a Puppy laptop console window. The same window in which I launched the DD command I wanted to see what so far had been written to the unmounted, unformatted three terabyte external USB spinning hunk of iron. I should have launched another command console window that I could kill without affecting the dd transfer. I typed 'cat /dev/sda' and my window filled with ascii interpretations of machine code. That answered my question - yes, something has now been transfered onto the unmounted, unformatted USB external drive, but it also answered quite loudly, as each '08' byte rang the terminal bell and there were plenty of them. I succeeded in annoying myself. Humorous enough but I couldn't stop the display with control c, z or x and I couuln't figure out how to interrupt it, so I killed the command console process window on the puppy, which also halted the dd transfer. Ah well, live and learn.