# Offline Clone Function for HDD copy?



## residentorca (Jul 8, 2016)

I recently purchased an Inateck USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Clone Function. (Sorry I cannot post link to the dock as I am a newbie.) Would I be able to use its offline clone function to copy my TiVo HD's drive to another drive of the same size and avoid using a computer altogether? Thanks in advance!


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## residentorca (Jul 8, 2016)

Update: I checked on Amazon and one reviewer said it will work. I'm expecting the replacement drive to arrive soon and will provide an update about my experience.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

A byte-for-byte "clone" should work fine.


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## fcfc2 (Feb 19, 2015)

residentorca said:


> Update: I checked on Amazon and one reviewer said it will work. I'm expecting the replacement drive to arrive soon and will provide an update about my experience.


You might want to double check some of those 1 star reviews on Amazon again. It appears to clone a drive you must have a new larger drive, it cannot clone to the same sized drive.


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## residentorca (Jul 8, 2016)

fcfc2 said:


> You might want to double check some of those 1 star reviews on Amazon again. It appears to clone a drive you must have a new larger drive, it cannot clone to the same sized drive.


I was able to clone a 1TB to a 1TB drive before with this dock but my attempt to clone the TiVo drive failed for unknown reasons so I used JMFS instead. I think it may depend on whether there are bad sectors on the disks being used.


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

I have used the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 cloning dock to clone my Roamio 3TB WD Green drive to an identical model drive at least half a dozen times in the last year. Works perfectly every time. Takes around 7 hours to clone the 3TB, which is half the time it used to take when I went through a spare machine I have using either a Windows cloning program or JMFS.

This particular dock seems to have been discontinued - I can find ONE left on Amazon.


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## residentorca (Jul 8, 2016)

dougdingle said:


> I have used the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 cloning dock to clone my Roamio 3TB WD Green drive to an identical model drive at least half a dozen times in the last year. Works perfectly every time. Takes around 7 hours to clone the 3TB, which is half the time it used to take when I went through a spare machine I have using either a Windows cloning program or JMFS. This particular dock seems to have been discontinued - I can find ONE left on Amazon.


Thanks for sharing the experience you had with offline cloning. It's definitely a time saver compared to using tools like JMFS. May I ask why you have to clone so often?


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

residentorca said:


> Thanks for sharing the experience you had with offline cloning. It's definitely a time saver compared to using tools like JMFS. May I ask why you have to clone so often?


Having six tuners constantly being recorded (whether you're actually recording  shows or not, all six tuners have the 30 minute buffer going) will, sooner or later, exceed the drive's useful life. Also, I would be *very *unhappy if I lost everything I have recorded (drive is about half full) due to a drive failure.

I have three 3TB drives, and I rotate them through every couple of months using the dock to clone them, usually overnight. It takes very little effort on my part, and in case of drive failure, the vast majority of my stuff is preserved.

I did it less often when I was using a spare machine I had to boot and it took 14 hours, but the cloning dock makes it ridiculously simple.


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## oobx (Jul 11, 2016)

dougdingle said:


> I have used the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 cloning dock to clone my Roamio 3TB WD Green drive to an identical model drive at least half a dozen times in the last year. Works perfectly every time. Takes around 7 hours to clone the 3TB, which is half the time it used to take when I went through a spare machine I have using either a Windows cloning program or JMFS.
> 
> This particular dock seems to have been discontinued - I can find ONE left on Amazon.


I have an HUR2-SU3. I have been looking for a manual online for an hour or more with no luck. Maybe it's in my closet somewhere. But, I just need to know how to clone a 72GB platter drive to my new PNY 240GB SSD. I have it in clone mode and the smaller drive in the slot labeled "source HDD" and the larger drive in the other slot. I pressed the button for a second and it just blinked the orange light for five seconds. Then, I pressed it for a few seconds and it started blinking the blue light for hours. It never made it past the left blue light. It seems like it should progress to the next one until the 4th, each indicating 25% complete. But, it never progressed. I pressed the button again and now the 25% blue light and the orange light are blinking.

Thanks in advance.


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

oobx said:


> I have an HUR2-SU3. I have been looking for a manual online for an hour or more with no luck. Maybe it's in my closet somewhere. But, I just need to know how to clone a 72GB platter drive to my new PNY 240GB SSD. I have it in clone mode and the smaller drive in the slot labeled "source HDD" and the larger drive in the other slot. I pressed the button for a second and it just blinked the orange light for five seconds. Then, I pressed it for a few seconds and it started blinking the blue light for hours. It never made it past the left blue light. It seems like it should progress to the next one until the 4th, each indicating 25% complete. But, it never progressed. I pressed the button again and now the 25% blue light and the orange light are blinking.
> 
> Thanks in advance.


I just tried it with two old 1TB drives. Here's what works for me:

-Disconnect dock from the computer totally, power off.
-Switch on back to 'clone'.
-Connect the drives, power up the dock
-Once both drives have 'spun up', orange light in middle goes solid. It should not blink again.
-Press and hold the 'clone' button on front until the first blue light on the left starts blinking.
-Once it starts blinking, the cloning process has started. The first blue light should go solid at 25% completion, next blue light starts blinking, and so on. Once all four blue lights are solid, it's done. A 72GB drive should go quickly, less than 30 minutes.
-Once it completes, you'll need to use Windows Disk management or some partitioning program to expand the new drive to full size (it will be 72GB when the cloning is done, with lots of free space behind the first partition).

EDIT: The last step using Windows Disk Management or a partitioning program *will not work on TiVo drives*. It's only useful for drives to be used in Windows.

.


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## TiVoTJung (Jan 29, 2014)

i bought one of those disk to disk copy and it works. i bought a 4tb image off of ebay and copied it and threw it in my tivo with no issues


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## rasthedane (Sep 13, 2016)

Hello. I hope it's appropriate that I post my question here, rather than a new thread.

I'm planning to clone an old 4TB Tivo-formatted drive to a new out-of-the-box 4TB drive (it's a WD "red" drive), using the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 off-line clone function.

Do I need to "Tivo-format" the new drive first (using MFSR) before cloning? Or will the byte-for-byte function make that unnecessary?

Thanks in advance!


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

rasthedane said:


> Hello. I hope it's appropriate that I post my question here, rather than a new thread.
> 
> I'm planning to clone an old 4TB Tivo-formatted drive to a new out-of-the-box 4TB drive (it's a WD "red" drive), using the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 off-line clone function.
> 
> ...


It should clone without an issue as long as it supports large drives. The only way of messing things up is not putting the correct drive in the source slot.


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

rasthedane said:


> Hello. I hope it's appropriate that I post my question here, rather than a new thread.
> 
> I'm planning to clone an old 4TB Tivo-formatted drive to a new out-of-the-box 4TB drive (it's a WD "red" drive), using the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 off-line clone function.
> 
> ...


No need to do anything but make sure you put the correct drive in the correct slot.


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

oobx said:


> I have an HUR2-SU3. I have been looking for a manual online for an hour or more with no luck. Maybe it's in my closet somewhere. But, I just need to know how to clone a 72GB platter drive to my new PNY 240GB SSD. I have it in clone mode and the smaller drive in the slot labeled "source HDD" and the larger drive in the other slot. I pressed the button for a second and it just blinked the orange light for five seconds. Then, I pressed it for a few seconds and it started blinking the blue light for hours. It never made it past the left blue light. It seems like it should progress to the next one until the 4th, each indicating 25% complete. But, it never progressed. I pressed the button again and now the 25% blue light and the orange light are blinking.
> 
> Thanks in advance.


Since posting my original reply to this, I have twice tried cloning smaller drives (128GB SSDs), and got the same failure you did - the first blue light stays flashing forever.

The dock continues to work for me with drives 1TB and up in size, and continues to make perfect copies of my 3TB Roamio drive. I have no idea what the problem might be with the smaller drives.


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## rasthedane (Sep 13, 2016)

Thanks dougdingle. 

The cloning seemed to go fine -- though 4TB took a long time, almost 8 hours. But that's as expected, right?

But when I installed the new drive, it was Tivo-formatted... but without my old recordings. The new drive did "remember" my OnePasses. Isn't that odd? I'd expect it to have everything or nothing. But the old harddrive was probably damaged (giving the four-lights error described in other thread), so perhaps that's why.

Either way, things are looking good for now. In this particular case, it's not the biggest of deals to lose the recordings. Most of the content I really wanted to keep was already backed up elsewhere (but transferring it back and forth with kmttg takes even longer!).

But moving forward, I think I'm going to follow your approach of periodic cloning. Aside from running the clone-job and swapping the drives back and forth, there's nothing else I should worry about, right?


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

rasthedane said:


> Thanks dougdingle.
> 
> The cloning seemed to go fine -- though 4TB took a long time, almost 8 hours. But that's as expected, right?
> 
> ...


8 hours for 4TB is actually kinda quick - it takes me 7.5 hours for 3TB.

Since it's a byte for byte copy, the only reason your shows would not come across is if the source drive was damaged in some way, as you surmised.

Periodic cloning should just go. The only concern as always is that you get the source and destination slots right.


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## rasthedane (Sep 13, 2016)

Perfect.

Thanks again -- also to @jmbach, whose reply I'd missed.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

You guys need to learn how to use

dd_rescue 

or 

ddrescue


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

unitron said:


> You guys need to learn how to use
> 
> dd_rescue
> 
> ...


While those may serve well when there's a problem with the source disk, for non-damaged disks I much prefer the cloning dock. It's standalone, fast, and doesn't tie up a machine.


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## Luke M (Nov 5, 2002)

The only problem with cloning is, if there is no unpartitioned space at the end of the drive, then you can only clone to an identical or larger (in sector count, not advertised TB size) drive. X TB advertised drives can vary by a few MB in size.


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## dougdingle (Jul 4, 2007)

Luke M said:


> The only problem with cloning is, if there is no unpartitioned space at the end of the drive, then you can only clone to an identical or larger (in sector count, not advertised TB size) drive. X TB advertised drives can vary by a few MB in size.


True dat.

I did take that into account when I bought my backup drives, and the 3TB WD Green and WD Red drives I use clone back and forth without issue.

The idea was to be able to do the rotating clones without effort and offline without tying up a full machine. The 3TB drives clone in about 7.5 hours, and so far (about 18 months), the system has worked nicely for me using the system every 60 days or so.

The most labor intensive part is removing and replacing the drive in the TiVo, and I'm working on that with a SATA extender cable so the drive sits outside the box.

What would be really cool is a double-secret Kickstart command that allowed cloning the internal drive to an external one connected though the eSATA port. Never gonna happen, but fun to think about.


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## V7Goose (May 28, 2005)

Interesting thread. But information on the Mediasonic products seems very hard to come by - their web site and forums are not particularly helpful. Can anybody tell me the definitive difference between the Mediasonic HUR2-SU3 mentioned so often here and the HUD1-SU3? For cloning TiVo disks, are they both acceptable?

The only difference I can find on their product information is that the HUR2 includes this single line "*Linux software RAID supported*". But that is not explained. It sounds vaguely like the dock can be used to support a RAID array without needing it to be defined on a separate computer?

But since both docks are compatible with Windows and Mac software, so it would seem that they would function identically for any TiVo cloning. Anybody know the real facts?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

Cloning drives in a dock is usually just a byte-for-byte copy. As long as the destination drive has at least as many sectors as the source drive it doesn't care if it's Mac, Windows, TiVo or all zeros.


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## V7Goose (May 28, 2005)

I emailed the company with this question - here is the response:
Hi,

Both items are the same . Exactly same

HUR2-SU3 is a Newegg part#

and the "Linux software RAID Supported". is What Newegg wanted us to put.

And yes they didn't provide explanation for that either. they just want it to say that.

regards

Mediasonic RMA and Technical Support Department​
I have a bit of experience with Newegg, and I can tell you that they, as well as other big retailers, often ask for special part numbers and descriptions simply so they never have to price match an item. In this case, the HUD1-SU3 is currently available on Amazon AND cheaper than the Newegg unit, so I know which one I'm gonna buy!


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## TiVoTJung (Jan 29, 2014)

ggieseke said:


> Cloning drives in a dock is usually just a byte-for-byte copy. As long as the destination drive has at least as many sectors as the source drive it doesn't care if it's Mac, Windows, TiVo or all zeros.


yea i learned not all 4tb drives are the same. trying to clone a purple to a green drive did not work. i hooked up both drives and found the purple drive to be a couple of mb bigger.


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