Disk Cloning

Is there a device that allows you to clone a hdd onto a smaller hdd? ie: Take a 1TB hdd (with only 100GB used) and clone it to a 250GB SSD? I've used several cloners that don't allow you to clone to a smaller drive even though the used amount of space is less than the total space of the new drive. I know this can be done with software such as paragon but I don't want to dedicate a computer to clone. Thanks Sup Forumsentlemen!

I cloned my 1Tb hdd onto a 500gb SSD after i moved all my big files to a seperate hdd. Only took about 5 hours. Think i used macrum reflect. How often are you cloning drives to warrent hardware for it?

I work for a MSP, so we clone all the time. We have some hardware cloners but since so many people are upgrading their 1TB HDDs to 240 or 500GB SSDs, I'm curious if there are other options. The hardware is just so much easier to setup and run than using software.

Aomei backerupper free version does this in software, even if it looks like the option can't be selected until you get the paid one. I cloned my 3TB windows drive onto a 1TB one so I could put the 3TB one in my NAS. Was using less than 1TB at the time, obv.

Use gparted to shrink the partition to a smaller size than the destination.

Image the disk with whatever program you use to image with.

Restore image to new disk, use startup repair disk to make Windows boot again.

Expand partition to fill new disk.

You're done.

Yes it's called dd

Sorry but that's way too complicated. I just want to plop two hard drives in the cloner and hit start. There has got to be something out there that does exactly that.

looking for hardware not software

its not a thing. you need to do it with software.

dd

It's literally free and not complicated at all. You just type a smaller number into a box and click OK and wait lime 60 seconds then make an image to back up.
It's even F R E E

I want a solution that does NOT require a computer. Again, I just want to drop two drives in and press a button. Cost is not an issue (within reason)...time is money and the wasted amount of time using your method in a business setting outweighs the price of hardware I'm going to use several times. Your way absolutely works but adds a few extra steps before duplication.

Its literally 2 minutes of your time to do and its one of the simplist things you can do.
Dont try too hard to be so lazy

no

>Cost is not an issue (within reason)
Buy a computer and set it up to act the way you want your "device" to act.

It's called efficient not lazy. Why spend an extra 2 minutes on something when there's a device out there that can save 2 minutes. If I was doing this for myself at home once in a blue moon I would use your method. However, I need to do this daily for a business.

i just used Macrium Reflect or whatever Crucial offers with their SSDs, pretty cool, does require fiddling if you have multiple partitions and are moving to a smaller drive

There is NO solution for this that doesn't require a computer. If you manage to find someone to sell you a device that does this, it's probably a computer with e a shell script to run the copy job.

Hard drive space isn't allocated sequentially, so data can be located anywhere on the disk even if the disk is not full. Hardware-level disk copy is sector-for-sector, and has no way of knowing whether a sector contains data or not. The ONLY way to safely copy a larger disk to a smaller one is to mount it and copy files at the filesystem level. You cannot do it with hardware.

Macrium Reflect can do this under Windows. I think Clonezilla can do it from a bootable USB but don't hold me to that.

I am not aware of any dedicated hardware devices that can do this, but Reflect+a cheap Windows laptop with a couple USB3 ports should be good enough. If reflect still has too many steps to go through, they can probably be automated with a script.

You're sounding like a baby boomer

Then make a script that automates it. Probably 10 minutes with bash with 2 different commands and you're done. 100% automated

gparted and ddrescue does bite by bite clone. Can also buy Disk Jockey product

With a device? no you can't, these devices are designed to clone 1:1 only. Don't waste money on them, they're fraud. A normal IDE to USB hub has more purpose then this crap.
You need to first shrink the partition with a partition manager then manually clone it to the smaller device with some cloning software, that's how I moved from HDD to SSD.

Back when I was cloning my 120gb ssd to my 500gb ssd iirc it did it by partition size. So maybe you could finagle it by...
> Partition the 1TB hdd a few GB larger than what is used
> Clone said partition onto ssd
> ???
Should work

hardware cloners
500GB -> 500GB harddrive

stop using shit cloning programs and use rsync or something you dumb nigger.

500GB -> 1000GB works too

The only solution to the problem you're having would be to somehow program a raspi to shrink and clone the drive.

The problem is that if you have a Unix filesystem on the 1Tb drive the files are spread randomly on the drive. So you would need to consolidate all the files through some program and shrink the partition before you can clone it. A similar process would be needed for Windows as well. Both of these have things built in to do this so the obvious solution would be to run the OS.

You may be able to automate this without need for a interface but you also need some way to check if it failed or not.

It's *not* a clone if it's smaller. Whatever does the copy or preparation for a dumb clone needs to be file(system) aware.

Sorry, but you'll have to just run your Linux machine to do this for a while. It's not like you can't do anything else with it while it's doing this, though.

> the files are spread randomly on the drive. So you would need to consolidate all the files through some program and shrink the partition before you can clone it
The obvious thing to do is thus to just use rsync or whatever to "clone" the files from the partition after you've cloned the MBR (if you have one of these still).

It'll transplant the files and even ensure they're the same at the destination. This should be basically ~just as fast as rearranging files within the filesystem to fit one smaller area which you then copy... unless your files are extremely fragmented. But even then, it'll basically defragment it for you as it copies, so it is an elegant variant.

>somehow program a raspi to shrink and clone the drive.
RasPI still being limited to USB 2 seems like a problem. You could just use a NUC or laptop instead, of course.