Clone a USB flash drive

[Hajra]

Hi everyone,
I have a computer which has Windows XP operating system. I wanted to know that can i make a backup of my usb drive. From few days i am trying to make a backup of the USB drive and i this usb which contains software. When i try to simply copy all the files to another flash drive, the software does not work. I wanted to clone the entire usb drive to the another one. So is it possible to do it. If it is possible then please help me...

[Hardwareman]

Yes it is possible. To do this you need to go to the hard drive's manufacturers web site and there you can find the software which is available for free, and you can do what you want. I have used the Maxtor maxblast which can help you to clone any of the usb drive and also it has Acronis which is builtin that can helpful for making a compressed image so that by it you can restore the any of the drive back to the way as it was when you first made the image.

[Maxforu]

There is also another way by which you can have the solution for your problem. You can use WinRAR.
1. Simply you need to select all the files on the pendrive, and then do the right click on the selection and then press "Add to archive".

2. Then on the option window there you need to select a path where you want to store the archive, and then select the compression ration.

3. Note the most important thing that you need to select the "Put recovery record" option, which will help you to insert in the archive some kind of data which can help to recover the archive contents if the RAR file becomes corrupted.

[Killen]

To clone a usb drive i think you need to use the linux which can help you to do it without any of the problem. I always use and found that the dd on the Linux is the best tool by which you can make byte to byte copies of the drives to the another drive.

dd if=/dev/sdX of=driveimage.img

This will copy the entire drive including the boot sector to the file called driveimage.img Replace X with the correct device numbers.

[T.J.]

Thanks killen, it really helped me. I have another option that to get a much smaller dd image backup file, with this you can write a dummy zero file to the flash drive, and then erase it, after that make a new backup and then compress it, here is how it represents:

cd /media/DRIVE_NAME (your drive name)
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin
rm test.bin
Now, after this you can repeat the procedure and then compress the output file.