Question Need to make an exact copy of HDD - want your advice!

[grigory]

Hello! I use Ubuntu 16.04 (Desktop edition). I made an image of a whole disk by using Clonezilla. I've got my servers running on Ubuntu and I want to have a duplicate hard drive in case the old drive fails. I'll attach two pictures of both drives with all the info about them. They seem to be exactly the same. So what I'm asking is... Is it possible to just put a new disk and run Clonezilla in order to produce the duplicate drive/ And what's more important... would that new drive work exactly the same and would I need to change anything in Ubuntu? My logic tells me that if it's gonna be the exact copy then I'm all set to use it in case the previous drive fails.

 

[aigomorla]

If you did the image properly then yes.
I am not familar with Clonezilla, but if its like any other partion clone, then it should work as you describe.

 

[TheELF]

If you did the image properly then yes.
I am not familar with Clonezilla, but if its like any other partion clone, then it should work as you describe.

You do not want to do a partition clone here,you want to make a bit to bit(bitlevel) whole disk clone.
Cloning partitions will work but it's not a drop in replacement you will have to make sure to rebuild grub when replacing the disk.
Also drop in replacement only works if you connect the cloned disk to the same sata port the original was otherwise you have to tell your bios that the boot disk is on a different port now.
Also get a third disk so you can backup your system each week interchanging between the two backups so you never lose more than a week worth of data.
If you only backup to one disk and something goes terribly wrong you are screwed.

Differences between file-level and block-level cloning

When discussing backup options, frequently we will mention cloning. There are two basic types of clones, block-level and file-level, and here are the differences between them.

www.cnet.com

 

[grigory]

TheELF,
I'vу a WHOLE DISK image clone, not a partition clone. So I assume, it's exactly that bit by bit option you mentioned.

 

[TheELF]

TheELF,
I'vу a WHOLE DISK image clone, not a partition clone. So I assume, it's exactly that bit by bit option you mentioned.

Yes,and you don't even need to use exactly the same HDD drives they don't even need to be similar,as long as they use the same controller,both sata or both ata,you can clone to any size (larger than the source) disk of any manufacturer.
The target will become a 250Gb disk just like the source and you can change that from the partition manager in linux after the clone to get the additional space.