How Do I Clone USB Boot Disk?

[pwfletcher]

How can I clone my USB boot disk to another USB DISK ... I want to have a backup in case the original fails. Do I need to do anything special? If I can do it from the shell, can someone please post the commands for me?

Thanks in advance ;-)

 

[peterh]

dd if=<original> of=<new> bs=64k

replace <original> and <new> with actual device names

 

[ProtoSD]

This question had been asked and answered excessively here. Just do a fresh install to a new flash drive and save your settings/config from your active system, it's really that easy unless you have made custom mods from the command line.

 

[esamett]

I have a need to be able to clone my USB boot drive. My MOBO doesn't like to boot off of CD with regular drives installed. It was recently painful to recover from a fried USB drive. I see the post by peterh about the dd command.

NOOB:
I presume I do this from the CLI - (command line interface).
What command do I issue to determine the USB drive names?
Please give example with real-life drive names.

Thank you.

 

[cyberjock]

This question had been asked and answered excessively here. Just do a fresh install to a new flash drive and save your settings/config from your active system, it's really that easy unless you have made custom mods from the command line.

What if we have specially loaded drivers? I have 2 .ko files I had to add..one for the network card and one for the raid controller we used.

 

[ProtoSD]

If you setup a cron script to rsync the location/name of the custom file(s), you could either have your spare USB key mounted locally or on another system and sync it over the network.

Maybe you could suggest a feature that would store a list of custom files in the FreeNAS database and would copy those files along with the config/database file when you save/make a backup of your settings from the GUI. I think the developers might be open to something like that.