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I'm upgrading from a Inland 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD to a HP EX900 NVMe PCIe M.2 500GB. In the past I've used Clonezilla to save an image on old drives as backup but this time it's struggling.

I booted Clonezilla from a USB and selected the disk-disk option like normal. It started out decently well at ~60 gigs/min but only made it to 10% before dropping to 600 mb/min. It's now been running for 8 hours and has '>65 hours left'. How on earth does it take so long for two drives with over 1gbs read/write speeds, connected on the same mobo to clone across a 16 core cpu? I didn't think this poor performance could be a reality.

I know there's nothing wrong with the drives as I used them both minutes before starting the clone. The 256 drive has ubuntu18 and the 500 drive did have win10. The Clonezilla stable version was downloaded only a few months ago.

What are the better options for cloning drives? Or where did I go so horribly wrong with my approach? Would going nvme -> image on old HDD -> new nvme be magically faster?

I'm looking for something that preferably:

  1. only copies sectors with written data (Clonezilla was making images of the entire drive when <50gb had been used)

  2. also copies the bootloader/grub (I'd prefer to skip mucking with this if possible)

  3. performs at speeds compliant with 2010's tech instead of 1990's

Thanks for the suggestions!

Garglesoap
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  • Not sure about "best" but `dd` is one option. For example: `dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M` . Boot your machine off of an Ubuntu USB, open a terminal, do: `sudo fdisk -l` to get the drive letters associated with the drives you want to clone, and plug them in to the `dd` command above. Just be sure you assign the source and destination disks correctly! – marshki May 14 '19 at 16:47
  • Thanks for the suggestion. Any idea if dd performs near expected speeds? I still can't get over clonezilla taking >24hrs for 250gb. – Garglesoap May 14 '19 at 16:57
  • You could monitor the progress of `dd` using `pv` per [this thread](https://askubuntu.com/questions/215505/how-do-you-monitor-the-progress-of-dd). – marshki May 14 '19 at 17:12

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