Cloning your SWS USB Stick

What is the dd command ?

Disk cloning is nothing but a mere process of creating an image of an entire disk. This can be useful for copying disks, backups, recovery and more. The dd command is easy to use tool for making such clones.

Your USB stick can be cloned and distributed to your users for secure remote access. You can also customized the SWS USB stick with your logos and settings for easier end users connectivity.

Steps :

1. Use a Linux system ( fedora,centos,redhat ect ) to plug your SWS USB stick.

2. Open a terminal windows and with the 'df' command identify the device name. In the example below the device name is : /dev/sdh (sdh1 is the 1st partition )

3. Run the 'dd' command to create and save the image to your local HDD.

# dd if=/dev/sdh conv=sync,noerror bs=128k | gzip -c sws_usb.gz

The above command just cloned the entire SWS USB stick , including the MBR, bootloader, all partitions, UUIDs, data etc and saved them in a file sws_usb.gz on your local HDD.

4. How to restore the image to other usb sticks ?  - Just plug your new usb to your linux machine, identify the correct device name using the 'df' command and restore the already created image using the command below.

# gunzip -c sws_usb.gz | dd of=/dev/sdh

Tips

#1: Not enough disk space locally? Use remote box
 
You can send the image through ssh and save it on the remove box called server1.cyberxnetworks.com:
# dd if=/dev/da0 conv=sync,noerror bs=128K | gzip -c | ssh user@server1.cyberxnetworks.com dd of=sws_usb.gz

#2: See progress while making an image with dd
 
You need to use GNU dd with coreutils version 8.24 as follows (pass the status=progress to the dd):
# dd if=/dev/sdh bs=128K conv=noerror,sync status=progress |gzip -c sws_usb.gz

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