[plug] RPi USB drive backups

[Chris Hoy Poy]

Hi Chris

If it's timing out with IO errors, you probably have a hardware problem
somewhere in the mix.

Cable , connector, hub or USB hard drive (probably the destination drive by
the sounds of it).

Shouldn't matter which software you use to copy (dd, rsync etc) - though
very different technical processes, if it's dropping data somewhere then
they will bomb out.

Cheers
/Chris


On Thu, 20 Mar 2025, 8:03 am Chris McCormick, <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:

> 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/
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