Cloning and imaging SD cards

[Harrison]

With many devices now using SD cards to load their OS and files they are pretty standard these days for many devices. Especially for Rasperry Pi, Steam Deck, and all the retro handhelds on the market now like the Ayn Odin and those from Anbernic.

Can anyone recommend some utilities/tools that make it easy to make a backup img from an SDcard, to write an image back or to clone an SD card?

I've found most Windows utilities tend to be very slow and unstable for larger SD cards. I need to do this to cards up to 1TB.

I've been considering Linux, using something like dd, but a nice gui frontend would be nice. Using Linux I could use a bootable usb stick to load it up. Plus as most systems using SD cards tend to format to Linux filesystems such as EXT4 it makes sense. Thy Linux filesystems is where I think using Windows can create to problems.

And does anyone know some good tools to test an SD card? A friend bought a new 1TB card and tried to clone another card to it, but it overheated and crashed Windows. So being able to test a new sd card before use would be good. I was considering Ubuntu's Disks application as this has benchmarking tools.

Any suggestions much appreciated.

 

[miggymad]

I use a few image writing/creating utilities for my SD and USB backups so in order of personal preference of:

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

https://rufus.ie/en/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

For testing SD cards if you own a Mac:

https://apps.apple.com/in/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12

 

[CrazyC]

I have always used HDD Raw copy tool to image my CF cards. But I dont use Linux or generally CF cards bigger than 8 or 16 GB.

 

[fitzsteve]

I've always used Winimage, never had any issues

 

[Pinback]

Just another portable tool for win: https://odin-win.sourceforge.net/

most of the time i use DD in combination with pv. wont get faster than that. or maybe you might look at clonezilla, but sounds like using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut.

have a read here, i cant sum it up better than the top answer there. https://askubuntu.com/questions/523037/how-would-i-speed-up-a-full-disk-dd

 

[Harrison]

Have you used any of these tools with large cards of 256GB+? That's where we are having stability issues.

Thanks for all the suggestions. There are a couple I haven't used before, so will be trying them out.

 

[fitzsteve]

I've only used up to 128gb but some micro SD adapters like those thumb stick style cheap ones can have issues above 32gb so best to avoid, I found SD to Micro SD adapters more reliable.

 

[StrongARM]

Larger SD than 128GiB are always unstable, kinda like the stubborn "technology" behind usb.

 

[miggymad]

I use one of those All-In- One multi card adaptors for my SD cards (see below). Like Fitzsteve says, above 32GB the USB stick adaptors can have stability problems even to the point of failing during the writing process.

 

[Harrison]

I use proper USB 3 SD card readers, rather then USB adapters, so hopefully that isn't the issue for me. The one I'm using at the moment is by Rocketek, and is meant to be capable of 625MB/s and access 5 cards simultaneously. Buy thanks for mentioning that. I will ask what my friend was using when his 1TB card failed.

 

[miggymad]

I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but I personally have had perfectly good image backups get badly written back to an SD card when the computer was being used at the same time for stuff such as web browsing.

I perceived it to be something similar to a buffer under-run problem when writing a CD or DVD.

 

[StrongARM]

Is it usb behaviouristic?! I suppose it is, with caches and all that...

 

[Harrison]

It must be USB buffer related. You can set different cache sizes in the Linux dd command to overcome and speed up copying.

A solution would be for a reader that isn't reliant on usb.

 

[miggymad]

I temd to leave the pc alone now if writing to SD cards or USB sticks.

Saves a lot of swearing

 

[StrongARM]

It must be USB buffer related. You can set different cache sizes in the Linux dd command to overcome and speed up copying.

...in windoozes remove the automatic set up usb limitations within the device manager...