[plug] RPi USB drive backups

[Chris McCormick]

Hey all,

Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the recent RPi meetup, otherwise 
that would have been a good place to ask about this.

Anyway, I have an RPi with a powered USB hub and two USB hard drives 
plugged in doing backups. The second drive is a mirror of the first 
which I have traditionally done with rsync. I recently replaced one of 
the drives and I now need to mirror the full drive to the new drive. 
I've been using rsync to do this but it takes ages just to do the 
initial diff and craps out after a while with IO errors and unmounts the 
destination drive. The total size of data is 2.3Tb.

What is a good way to do a fast copy of all of the data on one USB drive 
to the other? I'd prefer not to have to stuff around with partitions if 
possible as they have slightly different partitions on each drive and 
different labels etc.

LLMs were no help at all with this so I'm relying on the PLUG brains 
trust! 😅 Thanks for any suggestions.

Chris.

-- 
https://mccormick.cx/