What's the best way to clone a 2TB disk?

[LetMeEatCake]

am I right in thinking the end bit's
H:\[space]/G

Yes - you do need the space ... but /G isn't a valid option - you're best with /E (all directories) or /S (all non-empty directories) as above.
You can cancel the robocopy job at any time by typing CTRL+C (which means cancel to the command window, rather than copy) - so don't worry if it starts copying to the wrong place or anything.

 

[swee'pea99]

Got it - many thanks.

 

[Wobblers]

Take both drives out of Windoze machine connect them to a Linux machine go to command prompt type in
cp /media/disk1/*.* /media/disk2/. #confirm paths
Go make a cup of tea, come back disconnect drives & put them back in Windoze machine

Ha. I prefer

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

where a and b are the disks in question. (Best not to get them mixed up!) Works fantastically, I suspect that most people would rather not mess around with the raw device files though...

@swee'pea99, have a look at AOMEI Backupper. It's very good for copying the contents of one disk to another - I've used it to clone systems onto a new ssd. It's fast, free and simple to use.

 

[swee'pea99]

@swee'pea99, have a look at AOMEI Backupper. It's very good for copying the contents of one disk to another - I've used it to clone systems onto a new ssd. It's fast, free and simple to use.

Thanks - would that be better than the robocopy? I kind of like the sound of that, simply because it seems very simple and 'basic' - just intuitively it seems like it would be quick and clean. Would the Backupper be quicker?

 

[Wobblers]

Thanks - would that be better than the robocopy? I kind of like the sound of that, simply because it seems very simple and 'basic' - just intuitively it seems like it would be quick and clean. Would the Backupper be quicker?

I've not used robocopy, so I can't compare the two. It is simple, though: just select "Clone" then "Disk Clone" make sure you've selected the source and destination disks correctly (!) and leave it to run. I suspct for 2tb it'll take a while.

 

[swee'pea99]

I've not used robocopy, so I can't compare the two. It is simple, though: just select "Clone" then "Disk Clone" make sure you've selected the source and destination disks correctly (!) and leave it to run. I suspct for 2tb it'll take a while.

Sounds like my kind of program! Thanks.

 

[swee'pea99]

Ended up going with robocopy. I liked the name! Also it sounded simple and 'clean', and I like that. I did have one early glitch - an 'access denied' message popped up after 20 mins or so. But I googled it, found a suggestion to run cmd as an administrator, and since then it's been humming away like a good'un. At this rate I reckon it'll copy the full 2TB in about five hours, which seems pretty good to me. Thanks all!

 

[swee'pea99]

I was out when it finished, but I think 5 hours is about right. Job done! Excellent! (And that was with the source HD running USB2.)