A few years ago I made the mistake of not setting up a NAS instead using my Windows 10 PC as a file server in my home,
as my media collection has increased I now have far too many hard drives connected.
I’d like to clone these onto larger HDD’s and reduce the footprint and power consumption they are all taking up, but every piece of Windows software I’ve ever tried to clone my HDD’s gives the same error of incompatible partitions even when trying from one identical drive to another!
Can someone recommend some Windows software that they know works or alternatively is there a way in Linux I could use my Vero’s to perform this?
Haven’t tested it, but google gives me g4l.
Why do you need to clone? Why not just copy the files across?
Having said that, I’ve used clonezilla but a few years back, now.
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I’ve use clonezilla several times and it works well. But as @grahamh said, why bother if you are moving to a new larger drive. Just copy the files.
If I just copy the files across I then have to set up new shares, add those shares to my Vero’s then get all the double entries deleted, unless you all can tell me a way to avoid that scenario on my Vero’s?
You setup the shares using the same names. For example if you have drive1 and drive2 and wish to combine them, you would create 2 directories on the new larger drive, drive1 and drive2 and then use those (/mnt/newdrive/drive1 for example) as the mount. On the vero you would mount them in the same place as you used to, /mnt/drive1 /mnt/drive2 etc.
…assuming they are mounted in the Vero filesystem. If they are just being accessed as smb: shares from Kodi and @Buckeye is just replacing discs on his PC (ie not moving the new discs to Vero/USB) then I think he just has to unshare the old disks and share the new folders using the same share names as before.
A lot of people use openmediavault you set it up and then it’s headless you can use the same computer if you’re just using that computer for only a NAS you can test out openmediavault with a Raspberry Pi 3 before making your decision which I did or you can go the FreeBSD route which is called FreeNAS which is the most popular for NAS servers I’m personally going to use openmediavault because I’m more familiar with it and if there’s a hiccup I will understand the commands better being that I have been running Linux for 15 years. I do not know how you have your setup it sounds like you just keep adding external hard drives lol
that is me at the moment. I was in the process of building a new Nas server but some medical issues came up and had to have surgery
Cervical disc angioplasty if you’re curious lol I have not played with freenas but that is the popular one however on their website I don’t know if it’s a marketing scheme to get you to buy there shark logo server lol it says it requires 8 gigs of RAM. Openmediavault you can run on a Raspberry Pi 3 which I did for a year for fun I used it to backup files onto an external hard drive that was two terabytes and it worked perfectly. So if you have the resources set up a new Nas and just transfer your media over unfortunately it’s going to be time-consuming but worth it.
Thank you everyone for the helpful suggestions but I think I’ve stumbled across a rather simple solution.
I copied all the files from a 5tb hdd onto an 8tb one, removed the 5tb drive from the computer, reassigned the drive letter in this case drive G: to the 8tb drive and Windows seems to think its the same drive and is sharing it across the network but now I have an extra 3tb storage available.
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