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A little backstory; my brother upgraded the internal drive of his PS4 to a 2TB Seagate SSHD and the drive ended up dying. He somehow managed to disable automatic cloud backups for his game save data (even though he pays for PS+), so he potentially lost everything. Luckily the drive was within warranty, and Seagate said they would try to recover the drive if I send it in. It looks like they successfully recovered the drive, and returned it to him.

The issue is that they sent the drive back to him in an external "Backup Plus Ultra Touch"; which I could teardown to get at the standard SATA drive inside, but I'd rather not do that. The risk of damaging the drive makes me apprehensive, plus I would lose a perfectly good 2TB external drive (though I could still probably repurpose it, assuming I don't break it).

I was hoping to duplicate the disk directly to the internal drive Seagate also sent him as a replacement for the defective one. But it is proving to be more difficult than I thought.

Sony seems to lock down the internal drives; apparently they're locked to the PS4 they were formatted on, and it is "unreadable" on macOS, Linux, and Windows. I can't seem to copy the data at all as I don't have read permissions (it's set to brw-r-----). I'm also afraid to mess with the drive too much, and risk the PS4 not being able to read it.

I also tried using SuperDuper! to clone the drive, but since the drive is in (what I'm assuming is) a proprietary format it doesn't show up in Finder to select as a drive to copy from. It only shows up in Disk Utility.

Has anyone attempted this? Or have any suggestions as to how I can duplicate this disk?

Bryan
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    You could try transferring the saves manually to a flash drive and importing them. However, PS4 saves are encrypted, so there is no guarantee what was recovered can be imported. Since it's unlikely what was recovered is enough for the PS4, if importing the saves do not work, then you are likely out of luck. If the replacement drive is a USB drive, you could just connect that to the PS4, and try importing the saves. However, I am going to guess what was received, was only what Seagate was able to recover in a flat directory. – Ramhound Mar 28 '21 at 02:27
  • @Ramhound The problem is that the data is now on an *external* drive, so I can't put it in the PS4 to copy the data from it (unless, as I mentioned, I tear apart this external drive). I didn't try plugging it into a PS4 yet, but from what I've read the internal drives are not readable in that fashion. It does look like they recovered everything though, it has the standard 15-partition ridiculousness of an internal PS4 drive. Though I obviously can't test that until I get it into a PS4. – Bryan Mar 28 '21 at 02:37
  • @Ramhound Just tested plugging it into a PS4, and as I read, it is unable to read it as an external drive. – Bryan Mar 28 '21 at 02:43
  • Yeah; Sounds like your only hope is to tear it out – Ramhound Mar 28 '21 at 02:48
  • @Ramhound Shoot. Yeah, I was afraid that might be the only way… – Bryan Mar 28 '21 at 02:53
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    You could get yet another drive, along with an external caddy and use something like Clonezilla to do a sector by sector "full disk" copy. It would take a lot longer than simply dismantling the drive you have and cost more as well. It's not recovery software you want, it is disk cloning software, and you want to use whatever mode completely ignores whether or not it understands partitions and disk format. – Mokubai Mar 28 '21 at 08:28
  • @Mokubai That is exactly what I was looking for! I thought SuperDuper! would be able to create an exact clone, but I guess it's not meant for that? I already had an external caddy, and Seagate did provide a replacement drive on top of the external drive with the data on it, so I already had that as well. I ran Clonezilla yesterday; it took all day, and spit out a bunch of warnings, but it looks like it worked! I can't check the actual data on the drive, and it may be a while before I can get it into the original PS4. But the partition map looks the same, so I'm assuming that did the trick! – Bryan Mar 31 '21 at 12:23
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    I kinda suspect that SuperDuper, being a Mac disk tool is working in a fashion that is aware of the filesystem to avoid duplicating parts of the disk that it knows are empty and so in theory is faster, but I'm surprised it doesn't have a raw clone method. The problem is then that if it doesn't understand the disk then it won't "see" it. I just know for a fact that Clonezilla is a bit more generic and you can essentially say "I don't care what you *think* is there, just copy everything." – Mokubai Mar 31 '21 at 13:16
  • @Bryan I've added an answer. Over USB2 (or over a shared USB3 bus) it seems the best part of a day is not entirely surprising for 2TB. Hopefully your clone will work and everything works out. – Mokubai Mar 31 '21 at 13:26

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Superdisk appears to be more of a "system backup" tool than disk cloning, and is aware of the filesystem and avoiding duplicating parts of the disk that it knows are empty. In theory it is faster for that particular method as you are not copying unused sectors, but it's not that helpful for encrypted or otherwise "unknown" disk formats. As it doesn't understand the disk format it seems it completely ignores it.

I would use something like Clonezilla to do a sector by sector raw "full disk" copy. You should be able to copy the drive in its entirety to another drive using an external caddy. Clonezilla is a bit more generic and you can essentially say "I don't care what you think is there, just copy everything." as a raw disk.

It would take a lot longer than simply dismantling the drive though. USB2 has a limit of ~40MB/s and at best this answer to How long would it take to transfer 1TB over USB 2.0? seems to suggest that 1TB would take around 8 hours...

Mokubai
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