# Should cloning 2TB drive on XL4 take 10-12 hours?



## MrMidnight (Dec 2, 2013)

I am in the process of cloning the 2TB drive for my Tivo Premiere XL4 (model 758250). This would be just to have a backup drive in case the original drive fails. I only have about 4-5 hours of programs on the original drive, nothing critically important.

My question is this - will it reduce the drive cloning time if I have "permanenetly deleted" all "deleted" programs on my Tivo? Or will it have to "copy" the full 2TB drive? 

The reason I ask is that on my first attempt I used a 1TB drive as the back-up, and found out that the back-up failed since the drive to be cloned has to be equal or larger in size than the original source drive. The copy process for the first TB of copying took almost 5 hours. I have now purchased a 2TB drive and plan to run the clone this week - but am afraid it might take 10-12 hours.

(note - for copying, both sata drives are hooked directly to mother board on Windows system).


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

I did a 1 TB disk copy with jmfs and it took 7+ hours, so it sounds like your numbers are in the ballpark. If you're doing a full disk copy (like dd, dd_rescue, etc.) then the contents shouldn't matter since the entire disk will be copied.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

You could also just use DvrBARS to make a truncated backup of the original drive. It only takes a few minutes.

The resulting image file should only be about 2GB or less, which will fit on a DVD or $5 flash drive and you can use the 2TB for something else.

My 758250 factory image is 1.61GB and it zips down to 677MB.


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## MrMidnight (Dec 2, 2013)

ggieseke said:


> You could also just use DvrBARS to make a truncated backup of the original drive. It only takes a few minutes.
> 
> The resulting image file should only be about 2GB or less, which will fit on a DVD or $5 flash drive and you can use the 2TB for something else.


That sounds like a better/much faster way to do the backup.

So as I understand it, I would:

1. Hookup original Tivo drive to my XP computer (via Sata>USB adaptor for simplicity).

2. Launch DvrBARS and run "truncated backup".

3. Shut down computer, reboot with new 2TB blank drive hooked up.

4. Launch DvrBARS and run "Quick restore" to the new drive.

5. Shut down computer and boot to JMFS CD

6. Run "expand drive"

7. Test drive in Tivo.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

You can change step 3 to shut down DvrBARS, swap the drives on the SATA-USB adapter, and restart the program. No need to reboot the computer. You shouldn't even have to "safely eject" the drive after either step but I always do out of habit. The backup operation is read-only and I flush any unwritten bytes that Windows may be caching in memory to disk at the end of a restore.

Skip steps 5-7 altogether since you're starting with a 2TB 758250 factory drive. When it restores it will duplicate the existing partitions and there won't be any room to expand with jmfs unless you also want to supersize it.

Personally I'd stop after step 2, keep the backup file in a safe place, and use the new 2TB drive for other things until (or if) the factory drive ever decides to die. You can never have enough drives for backups etc.


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## MrMidnight (Dec 2, 2013)

Great advice, THANK YOU.



ggieseke said:


> The backup operation is read-only and I *flush any unwritten bytes* that Windows may be caching in memory to disk at the end of a restore.


How is this done?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

Courtesy of the FlushFileBuffers API function in Windows. They screw up lots of stuff (especially documentation) but it's actually a pretty good developer's platform.

Opening a write handle on a physical drive has a lot of challenges depending on your user rights, but once you get past that it's cake...


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## Jay2tak (Jun 10, 2009)

ggieseke said:


> You could also just use DvrBARS to make a truncated backup of the original drive. It only takes a few minutes.
> 
> The resulting image file should only be about 2GB or less, which will fit on a DVD or $5 flash drive and you can use the 2TB for something else.
> 
> My 758250 factory image is 1.61GB and it zips down to 677MB.


Thanks this is great info.:up:


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