Related to the drive copy question -- what about USB drives?
I've been reading the thread about backing up hard drives with
interest. I have a similar question.
I have a 4 TB external USB hard drive that I've been doing backups on.
Unfortunately, it's starting to get a little flaky -- not being
recognized by my laptop, etc. The problem got better when I changed
enclosures, but now I'm a little paranoid that it might continue to
degrade. So... I'd like to copy the data to a new USB external hard
drive.
The drive is about 96% full.
I have tried plugging the old drive into a USB port, plugging the new
drive into a USB port and simply doing a cp -Ruav from one to the
other. It goes gangbusters for awhile, but after about 5 or 10 gigs,
it slows down to almost nothing. At the end of 8 hours of copying,
it's plugging along, but I only have about 400 gigs copied.
I've searched the intertubes, and it seems that this is a problem
people have asked about across multiple distros. It is apparently
associated with some sort of cacheing issue in the kernel.
Is there some solution to this? I tried rsync, but it was even slower.
I haven't tried dd, which was mentioned in the other thread; I might
give it a shot this weekend. But if there's a known fix for this, I'd
love to hear it.
Thanks,
billo