Clone Vs. Copy

Cloning a hard drive does exactly what the word "clone" means - exact copy - IE partition info and everything. Copy and paste won't work to copy over things such as the OS because you need to duplicate everything to get the OS to work.

 

HI Rob,
The reason I asked was I had a 32 GB thumbdrive I wanted to copy to another identical 32 GB thumbdrive for backup purposes. The original just had data, no OS. Both were connected to USB ports. I wanted an exact copy (clone).

Norton Ghost would not recognize the thumbdrives as either a source or destination. I concluded that Ghost only wanted to work with hard drives for its cloning operation. Out of alternatives, I did a copy and paste. It worked, the data files ran, which surprised me since they were all installed on the original thumbdrive through the main application software. It must use actual file names rather than look-up tables when it does its search for data. Either that or it reestablishes its look-up table addresses before the data is used the first time. This is possible.

Looking at the damage to each thumbdrive in My Computer Properties, I found that the space taken by the copy was larger than the original. Larger by about 3 MB which, I thought was quite a lot. Bad sectors? If so , I did not think the Paste operation could detect bad sectors or use the Bad Sector look-up tables. I assume that thumbdrives have Bad Sector Look-Up Tables. The directory structures are identical from what I can see.

The copy is obviously not identical but I am happy with the results. What is going on?

Thanks, Sparky

 

Ahhh... You didn't say that you were copying thumb drives. Yes, copy and paste would be fine in this circumstance as you wouldn't have an OS installed on the thumb drive. Had it been a hard drive then yes, Norton Ghost would be the correct software to use.

As far as the bad sectors are concerned, the only thing that that would do would make it more of a pain to copy and paste things from the bad unit only because it would error out and make it difficult.

Thanks

 

I use a freeware program called AllwaySync... It is VERY cool... And free! If you are constantly swapping files between any two drives it will ensure that you always have the most recent according to what you tell it to do and where. I've always included it on the laptops I have sold and my customers love it.

 

HI TB,
I'll look into the program you are talking about. Not sure I will use it that much but it would be nice to be able to clone thumbdrives.

No one has yet been able to account for the difference of drive space used on my copied thumbdrive. It must be an unknown.

Sparky

 

Another possibility is that the additional "used space" is actually some utility bundled with the ThumbDrive; many of them, especially the larger ones, come with a small partition containing backup software or some encryption utility.

I've seen some where that partition is protected, and you cannot just format it to get rid of it...

mnem
Of course, that could just be where it keeps its gonads...

 

HI Rob,
Probably you know this but others may not. Bad sectors do not a bad drive make. All hard disks have bad sectors. They are found during testing and the bad sector address is stored into a Bad Sector Table. The driver, when writing to the disk, first checks the Bad Sector Table to see if the target location is bad. If the sector is not in the table, the write is completed. If the target sector is found in the Bad Sector Table, an alternative location is found and the write operation is mapped to the alternative. The mapping data is stored on the disk in a table created by the driver. This way, the write data can be found in an orderly fashon when a read operation is requested.

All of this is transparent to the operating system and the user. All the operating system knows is it requested a write under a certain directory and file. The driver takes care of the rest. I think it is a pretty neat sceme which is as old as hard drives themselves. Bad sector mapping was also a major reliability advance over tape for mass storage.

Sparky

 

A couple of thoughts on this.

1. You might check to see if both thumb drives have the same type file system: FAT 32 or NTFS or whatever. that might account for a difference in space consumed.

2. A possibility for loss of space on any flash drive is that after some use, flash blocks will go bad and the capacity of the device will be reduced. What you described - the files themselves being larger - does not seem to fit this case, though.

 

Yeah, I'm most def aware of it... the thing is that if you get enough bad sectors then the drive is pretty much just cheesed and won't work correctly.

 

Hi Dave,
No, the files are not larger on the copy. At least I don't think so but I certainly have not checked all of them. The additional space is not accounted for at this time.

Both thumbdrives are formatted for NTFS.

Sparky

 

Could it be that a few of the files on the original drive are compressed and on the cloned drive they have been expanded to a larger size??

Bob