Quickly clone a microSD card

Question

is there an easy and quick way to clone all data from one microSD card to another? I want to periodically backup contents of my phone card to a backup one, and as I have a lot of small files on the card, plain copying has a lot of overhead.

I think I could use some kind of disc image software, but I don't know if they are usable for flash memory media.

Is there a software that can do this easily, like Ghost for hard drives?

Solution 1

Since you don't specify an OS, here is the way I'd do it in linux.

plug in the card to your card reader. Mount it (it should mount as any old sdX#) dd if=/dev/sdX# of=/path/to/save/location/image.dd sync=noerror,notrunc bs=1k

This will give you an exact copy of the first 'parition' (if its partitioned.. if not don't worry about it). You can mount these with a local loopback as well to pick files off of the images.

If you are worried about file size, you can alway so something like this page suggests to get it to be smaller and more compact.

Solution 2

Try Macrium Reflect FREE Edition or dd for Windows.

Comments

[Pylsa]

Could you please specify the OS you're using?

[user3219303]

this question isn't OS related, I had a big chance of receiving an answer either for Windows, Linux or OS X, all of which I could use for the task. There was a minor chance of somebody suggesting a crazy nifty way to do that in BeOS or similar, where I'd be screwed with my approach :)

[Linker3000]

There seem to be very few user-friendly tools around for this task - I usually end up using dd (on Linux) or making a clonezilla partition backup and then restoring it. That may seem long-winded but it's quite quick.