[plug] RPi USB drive backups

[Chris McCormick]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

smartctl seems to think the hardware is fine. I did smartctl -a and it 
reported nothing unusual. I also ran a self test and this was the result:

$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [aarch64-linux-6.1.21-v8+] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining 
LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      6625 
     -

If the drive or the USB hub was overheating would that cause IO errors? 
I should also mention that the OS seems to remount the drive a read only 
once this happens.

Chris.


On 20/03/2025 08:09, Chris Hoy Poy wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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.
> 
>     -- 
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