Cloning hard drives onsite

[Martyn]

Is anyone doing this sort of jobs onsite? I always bring the job back but because of a cock up by a supplier of my hard drives and a need for my client to do some work I have temporarily put a 2nd hand drive in and will have to do two round trips when the new drive arrives. I am testing a clone with my dual docking station but that is taking two hours.

As an aside, I backed up a restored the client's data onto the temporary hard drive with Fabs. Client said his data was missing and when I checked the drive the user was backing all data files to his download folder!

 

[drjones]

There's no way I would.

Like you said, those jobs usually take at least 2+ hours to complete.

I'm starting to do cloning in a dedicated rig where I can hook up both source & destination drives via SATA; goes quite a bit faster than how I used to do it before of simply connecting the new drive via USB-SATA adapter.

Cloning & virus removal are not at all cost- or time-effective to do on-site.

 

[PC Ops]

No, never. Just takes too long.

+1 for a dedicated rig. I use an old P4 , connect the host and source directly via SATA and boot Parted Magic (-> Clonezilla) from USB.

 

[altrenda]

I am full onsite, but any one operation that takes more than about 30 minutes while I am watching progress bars gets taken back to the shop. People don't like to see you sitting there while the meter is running.

Usually the return visit is just to put the box back in and connect everything up.

It also allows me to do several of these operations in the shop at the same time.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Is anyone doing this sort of jobs onsite?

Yup...often do. So long as the client has the resources onsite to allow me to do it. (like additional HDD ports). Sometimes I may take the rig back to HQ to clone if it appears it will take a while. But often a clone takes just 15 or 30 minutes. Sometimes it's nice to just get it done, instead of hauling back to HQ...cloning..and then making yet another trip..and back..to the client. Gotta weight in the travel factor.

 

[Pants]

No, never. Just takes too long.

+1 for a dedicated rig. I use an old P4 , connect the host and source directly via SATA and boot Parted Magic (-> Clonezilla) from USB.

I've never thought of this before. I've got an old computer that I'm going to break out to use for this purpose...ie My cloning station I've got ide/sata converter boards for attaching sata drives to this old computer.

This way I don't have to mess with the main computer that I use for testing and other work.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I've never thought of this before. I've got an old computer that I'm going to break out to use for this purpose...ie My cloning station I've got ide/sata converter boards for attaching sata drives to this old computer.

This way I don't have to mess with the main computer that I use for testing and other work.

Yup that's what we have on our main bench...a big old tower (HP Business Desktop), we keep the side panel off...PATA and SATA cables hanging out of her.

 

[coffee]

I never clone on site for the reasons already stated. Besides, If there is an issue with the cloning I want to have my shop tools available right away to iron it out.

I have a AMD dual core with about 4 gigs ram in it and I installed 2 hot swap bays. Pretty cheap HSB bought from newegg. These are sata bays. They will do both 2.5 and 3.5 drives. I run linux mint on the tower and access it via remote desktop. Just boot up, Load the drives (2 bays) and away we go! I use DD alot to clone sector by sector.

@YeOldeStonecat - What are you using to clone drives in 15 minutes? Are we talking 15 minutes on a 7200 sata drive or something like a 15k drive?

coffee

 

[Markverhyden]

I avoid it like the plague. But I do not stick around if it's going to run over an hour. So it's a return trip if they do not want me to take the machine.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

@YeOldeStonecat - What are you using to clone drives in 15 minutes? Are we talking 15 minutes on a 7200 sata drive or something like a 15k drive?

coffee

At the office, Bench rig.....an HP biz series tower with the side panel off. At clients...a desktop that is available for my use, I'll just snag the SATA ports and dangle drives from it. We usually use Acronis (brand name) TI...like the WD or Seagate version, when cloning. If a drive isn't tanked too badly yet, I've seen 'em clone that quickly. Sure...one that have both feet at the edge of the cliff ready to jump can take a long time...in which case, back to HQ!

 

[Martyn]

I've been experimenting here and you're looking at 1.5 - 2hrs for a clone. Outside realistically of doing it onsite unless you have other work to do there.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Varies a lot based on quite a few factors.
*health of source drive. good health, it will allow fast reads. poor health...clearly requires longer time.
*Make/model of course drive, performance, how much cache
*Make/model of destination drive, how much cache. Higher performance drives will write faster.
*What interface/bus you're using to clone. Across USB...yup, take a sleeping bag with you or take it back to HQ. Using different SATA ports on a good Intel mobo..much faster.
*Of course it doesn't need to be said...how much data is on the source drive. Some kid with 188 gigs of iTunes...yeah, will take a while. But a basic office workstation with a minimal install of Windows, MS office, some LOB apps like Quickbooks...something like 45 gigs worth, very small volume to copy and I've definitely seen that go in as little as 15 minutes for some standard 240 or 320 gig HDD. Since I'm an SMB guy..that's what I mostly see. Not the bloated residential clones.

 

[PC Ops]

... we keep the side panel off...PATA and SATA cables hanging out of her.

Exactly the same here
Old (2005) Dell rig though.

On topic: like I said before. I just wouldn't. And if it absolutely has to be done onsite, I wouldn't stay for a chat about the weather or so. I'd come back later.
Most of my customers aren't really that far away though.

 

[CompConfig]

I have many clients that have 7 - 40 computers that have been with us for many years. At each of these places after we do a computer upgrade. We take one or two of the best and set it up in a back office. We use one as an emergency replacement for whatever computer went down. The other we use for on-site cloning and testing and other repairs. In two places with more than 20 computers we built all the computers with pull out hard drives. Keep extra drives cloned on-site and one extra machine. Never any down time.

 

[CompConfig]

In fact, in thinking about it. At all of our clients that have a server and as a result no user data is kept local we image every machine onto a Usb drive. On our residential clients we setup the computers with separate partitions and image the os partition. Then just do regular backups of the data.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Just did a clone of a 320 gig HDD from a Dell Latitude.
8 minutes.
Using WD Acronis TI 2013.

 

[coffee]

Just did a clone of a 320 gig HDD from a Dell Latitude.
8 minutes.
Using WD Acronis TI 2013.

Is this version of ATI only work on WD drives or will it actually work on pretty much all drives?

Curious.......

coffee

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Is this version of ATI only work on WD drives or will it actually work on pretty much all drives?

Curious.......

coffee

With the specialized versions of TI...be it Seagate, or WD's...you have to have at least one brand of their drives connected.
If I had two Seagates or a Seagate and a Hitachi drive...it would not work, so I'd use Seagates version.

Right now I'm onsite, cloning this image to several more laptops. Some have Hitachi drives, some have Seagate drives. But my source drive is a WD Black. I'm cloning a second one right now..also 8 minutes. I'm in my clients server room....where I'm using an Optiplex 7010 as my cloning rig. It has 3x onboard SATA ports. Using SATA 0 for my source drive, SATA 1 is the bootable DVD for TI, and SATA 2 is my destination drive which I keep cycling with other drives from laptops waiting for the image.

And as I'm cloning, staff from my client (an office of about 75 peeps) keep coming stopping in to yack..so it's nice being social. (I'm an outgoing type).

 

[MobileTechie]

I've done it plenty of times onsite. Most computers tend to have a spare SATA port to use - if not I use the DVD one. You want to avoid USB cradles unless the amount of data is very small.

Obvously it depends how much data is on there but with B2B work, taking the item away sometimes isn't an option.

Even for domestics - you have to factor in the added journeys and bench time. Sometimes it's cheaper to do it onsite for you and the client.

 

[drjones]

Classic example why I wouldn't dream of doing this stuff on-site: yesterday I had to clone a standard drive to SSD, gave me a bunch of headaches & errors.

Ended up getting it done, but would have been painful on-site. At my office, I can hit "start" and go do other stuff while it works away.

Tried that AEOMI Backer-upper or whatever http://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html

that I read about here, and it's pretty slick....that's what I ended up using to get the job done; the EaseUS Disk Clone I always use didn't work in this case. I think the source was too big; the AOMEI let me choose partitions; I just didnt copy over the recovery partitions.

StoneCat, I don't know how the heck you're getting clones done that fast. Even from a mechanical to an SSD, it took over an hour for me.