So what do you guys use for making a disk image of a USB drive? While Linux has FSArchiver i can't find a Windows equivalent, they either don't work with USB drives or create a clone of the drive that's 128GB instead of an image that only contains the used blocks. Is there an out of the box solution, do i really have to wait ages creating an image of unused space and more time compressing the resulting image.
Can't you just liveboot a Penguin distro and do it that way? IME image management on Windaz is a bag of old arse.
Try ImgBurn (http://imgburn.com/), its really old but has worked fine for me in the past. Been a while since I have used it though.
Macrium doesn't support imaging of USB drives, I'll give EaseUS a try, it only mentions EXT2-3 so i guess it could work with EXT4 (I should've mentioned that the USB drive was using EXT4 shouldn't I). Edit: Just tried EaseUS but it was a no go, it seem to only let you copy a partition from one drive to another instead of making an image. I am using a proper OS. FSArchiver does (has done) exactly what i need but Windows seem to be lacking in an equivalent. I guess i could but buying another USB drive just so i can image the first USB drive seems a bit of a faff. Agreed image management on Windows sucks, i mean it's got better than it used to be but it's still pretty woeful. Just tried it but it didn't pick up the USB drive.
Y'see, this is what you get with an operating system that cares about that sort of stuff. There's a reason POSIX has the "everything's a file" ethos.
I am not 100% sure but there is a free version of HDClone that might work, albeit slowly. The product comparison on the page seems to infer that it will do a drive copy via USB (1.1 & 2.0 - not 3, that you have to pay for). I've used it to clone a drive (was slow), just not used it on USB drives.
True but if I'm honest I asked the original question more because i thought i was being dumb than a i have to do this sort of thing, i can live with making a 128GB image and then compressing it but i couldn't workout why Windows didn't have something like FSArchiver. I thought making images instead of cloning SD cards and USB drives was an obvious need for Windows users and my GoogleFu was letting me down, but it seems not, backing up a 1TB SD card with 1GB of data on it must be a nightmare.
No need to be so down on yourself, depending on how much data they've actually got on the drive 16gb might be more than enough.
Balena etcher. Used it to clone my pihole sd card. Reflashed it to a new card and plugged it in. https://www.balena.io/etcher/ Edit: oh wait.... you mean an actual HDD... lol I have used clonezilla in the past with good results.
