Image/Clone Entire Disk including OS X and Boot Camp Partitions

Is it possible to clone an entire Mac disk including both OS X and Boot Camp partitions?

Background: My company is switching from PCs to Macs. We want to have a dual boot platform. Before I used to create and deploy Windows 7 images via Symantec Ghost. I am now looking for a similar solution or the least time consuming solution to deploy a customized dual boot platform to all of our workstations (all iMac computers).

Can I create a cloned system image and deploy it on a new machine?

I am attempting to create a backup image of a system deployed on a machine now. Then I would like to deploy this image on a different computer. Despite driver incompatibilities is this possible/recommended?

Copying a VHD to a physical disk

I've seen a lot of guides on how to do physical -> VHD, but is there any way to easily move a VHD image to a physical disk easily? Or should I just attach the disk and go to town with GNU DD?

Take a regular Windows 7 clone with clonezilla (device-to-image) partition only

I am unexperienced with cloning software and I've decided to use Clonezilla as it seemed best as freeware. I chose device > image and left most options standard. I chose expert mode anyway to see what I could configure, and decided to try the lzop algorithm instead of the default one for compression. The rest was left at default.

When Clonezilla asked me which partitions to clone (I chose parts to image), I chose the C:\ drive but Windows 7 also creates a 100MB partition on setup for system files (the actual boot partition?). I copied that into the image as well. The reason I didn't choose disk to image is that I also have a data partition that needs to stay intact.

Now I'm simply not sure that this is the way to go, should I ever need to restore my disk image. Will Clonezilla know what to do with both partitions and will Windows 7 work perfectly after restoring? Should I even copy the 100MB partition?

Edit: apparantly a similar question has been asked before. The link to the first article in the answer is not relevant to me since it covers a direct device-to-device clone.

It appears the windows installation disk can repair the 100MB partition. As for Clonezilla, it copies "hidden data after the MBR" by default too. I don't know, I feel I'll be allright whether by restoring the partition with Clonezilla or repairing it with the Windows 7 disk.

Does cloning a hard drive also copy over errors like bad sectors?

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?

My guess is that bad sectors aren't propagated during a clone process, but I could be wrong, so I wanted your opinion. THanks!

EDIT: Actually, I copied windows to a new hard drive, and the new hard drive has the bad sectors. So my question is a bit backwards, but you get the idea. :)

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.

Creating and Deploying Windows 8 Pro images for Surface Pro tablets

I have a stack of Microsoft Surface Pro tablets that I would like to setup with a base image, and some software for the company I work for. I know on Desktop machines I can go into Audit mode, make changes, then SYSPREP and clone the drives to all the new systems, but what would be the process on Windows 8 Pro tablets?

Free program to clone 3TB hard drive to another one with USB3 support in Windows 7?

All I'm trying to do is clone one WD 3TB GPT drive to another identical drive. One is internal, one is attached with a USB 3.0 dock. I'm copying from internal to external drive.

1. Macrium Reflect Free doesn't recognize either of the 3TB drives.
2. DriveImage XML will see both drives (if run as administrator), but will not list the USB 3 drive as a target drive when it's time to pick the target drive.
3. Ease US free edition doesn't support over 1TB.
4. Paragon's software doesn't seem to support drives the use GPT.
5. Clonezilla runs on a live CD, so I'd have to shut down my computer for hours while it copies the drive.

I just cannot believe that something so incredibly simple as cloning one drive to another can't be done, because software can't handle > 2TB GPT partitions or USB 3.0 connections. I'm absolutely baffled that such a basic operation isn't included in an operating system like Windows 7 (like how it can't mount an ISO, even though Microsoft distributes everything as ISO [Windows 8 supports it finally]). It's sad.

BTW, The only "killer app" I could find to clone my HDD to SSD was "Paragon Migrate OS to SSD", which copied my OS, shrunk the partition, and aligned the partition properly for SSD with like 2 clicks. I swapped in the new drive after about 11 minutes of copying, and it booted on the first shot, even though I cloned it with a windows update restart pending. I was impressed.

How do I clone a RAID 0 array to a single disk?

Situation:

1. One empty 120GB SSD
2. Two 60GB SSD's is RAID 0 containing a Windows 7 installation
3. The RAID is firmware-based (a.k.a. fakeRAID) which means it requires a driver for it to be seen by an operating system.

I don't want to use RAID 0 anymore; far too dangerous. I want to take the data from the RAID array and put it onto the single 120GB SSD. Ultimately, I want to keep the Windows 7 install completely intact; I don't want to reinstall anything.

Keep in mind I have multiple TB worth of free space to use as temporary storage for whatever transfers need to take place.

I looked into Clonezilla but it (as with most cloning software) doesn't support firmware-based RAID.

Full system clone, snapshot using rsync

I have automated backups running on my ubuntu box using rsnapshot (rsync) basically following this tutorial. My concern is how to restore if everything is lost. Since it does not seem that I can backup the entire drive and that I have to choose individual folders and some like proc/ cause problems.

Currently in my rsnapshot.conf I have (see below). Is there a way to just clone the entire drive? Or should I not do this?

Questions:

1, Can I backup in a way such that it is a clone of the drive so that it can be swapped with the current drive?

2, If not yes to clone, If I had a total drive failure would I install a basic ubuntu and then replace all the files with the backups?

3, Anything I might not know about that I should.

Thanks

###############################
### BACKUP POINTS / SCRIPTS ###
###############################

# LOCALHOST
backup  /var/           localhost/
backup  /home/          localhost/
backup  /etc/           localhost/
backup  /lib/           localhost/
backup  /usr/           localhost/
backup  /opt/           localhost/
backup  /root/          localhost/
backup  /sbin/          localhost/
backup  /selinux/       localhost/
backup  /srv/           localhost/
###backup /proc/          localhost/ 

Cloning OS X to many machines at once

Perhaps thisis an age old question, but as we started to have more and more Macs in the department I feel the need to streamline the setup time.

I have about 30 latest MacPro's and I need to install a bunch of software on them. So I was thinking about doing it all on 1 machines and then cloning the driveto 30 others. It would be nice if that can be done over network so all 30 at once but I guess that is asking rather much. Any ideas? I had a look at CarbonCopy and that seems promising. There is also CloneZilla.

Is there any experience out there for a largeish scale OS X setups? An immediate problem I can think of are the usernames. I guess they will have to be manually changed.

What if Macs also have Windows partitions? Will CarbonCopy and/or CloneZilla cope with that?

Alex

Bootable CD to backup a hard disk?

There are lots of tools like FoG, G4L, PING, CloneZilla, etc. which allow you to boot from a CD/USB-key and follow some on-screen menus to backup your hard disk to an FTP server, SSH server, or file-share on some other machine.

But [to reduce any possibility of human error when this task is done many times] is it possible to create a customised boot-disk which automatically stores a copy of your HDD image to a specified location?

Missing ssd storage space

I cloned my old HDD to a new HDD. My old HDD was 149GB with 6.8GB free space. The new HDD is 750GB. As you can see the new drive is much bigger than the old HDD.

After the cloning was done I noticed that the new drive only shows up as 149GB, with 6.8GB free space. (Same as the old drive). I know there should be at least 500 GB still free on the new drive.

My question are:

• Where is it.
• Can I redo or format the new drive to remove this information.
• What software would be best to use? (I used Emselus home ed. to clone.)

Alternative to rsync for file level cloning?

I have 500gb of files that I want to copy to a temporary drive and then back.

I would like to be able to do this as fast as possible.

I checked out doing a block level clone, which is nice and fast (a lot of my files are very small so using rsync takes ages), however I can't copy between two different partition types (with CloneZilla anyway) which I need to be able to do.

So how can I copy a bunch of data fast? I'd be happy to purchase a clonezilla alternative if it can copy between different partition types.

Running Mint and Snow Leopard.

Accurate drive backup or file/folder synchronization that maintains metadata

Problem

What I need is a way of quickly and easily, but properly and completely backing up a memory-card to a flash-drive (see scenario below for details).

Research

Obviously there are plenty of ways to do this (there’s a few backup-related question listed above and to the side as I type this), but the problem is that most solutions tend to have critical drawbacks and limitations. For example, simply copying or “synching” files will alter the created and sometimes even the modified timestamp of the backup. Moreover, they rarely seem to be capable of accurately detecting renames and moves (I’ve been struggling to get my Chrome bookmarks in sync on two systems because of this).

Imaging the drive will make a packed file that would require a viewer (or restoring the image to a drive) to access the files on the backup. And cloning the drive can be troublesome if the drives are not identical. Worse, cloning or imaging the drive would cause far too much writing to the backup device; the whole drive would essentially be copied even if only a couple of small files were modified. A differential image could be made, but that has all of the drawbacks of, well a differential image.

Requirements

What I am looking for is a method or program of making backups such that:

• Moved or renamed files are not wastefully deleted from the backup and then copied; if a file is renamed or moved, the program should be able to simply rename or move it
• The source and destination drives can be different media and different sizes
• The backup files have identical metadata (attributes, timestamps, etc.) as the source files
• The backup can be used like a regular disk (mounting an image might be acceptable if no drivers are required, but again, an image would write too much…)
• The backup causes a minimal of writing to avoid wearing out the flash media

Question

Does anybody know of a way to make effective backups like this?

^{I’ve had designs on writing the “perfect” backup program of my own for what feels like forever, but it always gets pushed aside for more immediate projects.}

Scenario

There was a good sale on storage, so I got a flash-drive and memory-card. The goal is to transfer all of my personal files (the kind that I created myself and are thus irreplaceable) into one place instead of having them scattered around different locations. That way I can have all of them together with me at all times, so I always have something to do.

Of course, since they are irreplaceable, I need to keep a regular backup, which is why I got two different types of media. One is a flash-drive and the other is a memory-card. They are from different (but reputable) manufacturers, but both the same (nominal, advertised) size. This decreases the chances of losing everything since there is diversity (two identical ones could be from the same lot and thus both bad).

The memory-card will be my primary storage because it tucks nicely into a computer’s card-reader whereas a flash-drive would stick out the side (begging to be snapped off), and occupy a USB port.

Use Macrium Reflect to Clone an SSD with three partitions to a larger SSD, expanding the middle partition

I'm trying to use Macrium Reflect Free to clone a disk from a 75 GB SSD to 225 GB SSD. The source has three partitions, and I want to clone them all, but I want the first and third to be the same size, and the middle one to be expanded to fill the remaining space on the drive.

In this screen capture, I have (1) added the first and second partition and (2) expanded the second partition, leaving 50 GB of free space.

When I click "Copy selected partitions", it should add the third partition (which is only 9.76 GB) into the remaining 50 GB of space, but I get this:

How can there be insufficient space?

I should mention that this is what I get if I try to copy the first and third partitions first:

It seems to be forcing the partitions to be placed in the same location as they were on the source, but why?

Primary question: How can I accomplish my goal of cloning these three partitions, with the middle one expanded to fill the free space on the disk?