[SOLVED] Cloning a USB drive

[Wonderclam]

I have a couple of USB drives I want to make copies of. They're custom USB boot devices for LG TVs to be able to communicate with our cable boxes at work. We only have 1 of each and I want to make copies of them just in case we lose them.

I have Windows 10 and I'm wondering what's the easiest method is. Are there any open source or freeware programs that can do this for me easily?

 

[Lutfij]

Perhaps give this a go...?

 

[TerryLaze]

win32 imager can read and write usb devices as long as they aren't copy protected it should work.

Win32 Disk Imager

Download Win32 Disk Imager for free. A Windows tool for writing images to USB sticks or SD/CF cards . This program is designed to write a raw disk image to a removable device or backup a removable device to a raw image file. It is very useful for embedded development, namely Arm development...

sourceforge.net

Another way would be to use dd for linux which is also available as a windows exe, this is a general cloning tool for devices so great care has to be given not to destroy your main hard drive by cloning some other drive onto it.

 

[Wonderclam]

I'm giving MiniTool ShadowMaker a try. Hopefully it works.

 

[Wonderclam]

MiniTool ShadowMaker didn't work. It says it did it sucesssefully, but bricked my USB thumb drive

Win32Disk Imager seems to have done the trick

Thanks, guys.

 

[Satan-IR]

You can use Rufus which has both installer and portable versions (portable = application which doesn't require installation and is a standalone executable).

It lives here.

It saves the backup of the drive in VHD format. This is useful because the files can be mounted natively in Windows as virtual drives. You can easily view and even edit the contents of the backup image before writing it back to the other USB later on.

I have personally used it for both making bootable USB flash drives and to backup a bootable linux distro from a USB flash to a bigger drive. It did the job without any problem with a few clicks.

This is how to use it. Make sure the USB media to copy is selected in the Device drop down menu at top. Then click “Show advanced drive properties” and an icon of a floppy disk will appear at the top right. Cick on the floppy icon, type the output file name of your choosing and press Save. The entire content of the device will be saved to an uncompressed VHD image, where you choose to save it.

Later on to write the VHD file back to a USB drive you have to select “Disk or ISO image” as the Boot selection type and press the SELECT button to browse for the previously saved VHD file (whereever you saved it).

P.S. I wanted to share a screenshot where I highlighted the places to find the advanced drive properties and the floppy icon in the app GUI but my attempts to share GoogleDrive or Dropbox links output the something went wrong error.