At work I had to make a backup copy of a USB key. Because it was some kind of "restore disk", it had a weird 1MB partition at the beginning of the device, so I had to make a byte-exact copy of the whole disk. And since it was a 32GB key, even though there was only 9GB of data used, the based dd command took a long time to run.
Or I could have just used a second USB key to boot from Clonezilla, a free Linux-based disk cloning solution. It's not CLI-based, yet you still need to be a little bit proficient with computer administrator. Otherwise, it is quite powerful, doesn't lock you into weird proprietary image formats like other commercial products, it's free and quite well maintained.
Published on June 1, 2012 at 21:13 EDT
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