Cloning USB Keys - DD no work-ey, Clonezilla does?

[pyperdown]

Ok, So I must be doing something wrong.

I put in my modified key.  dd if=/dev/sdb of=my_key.img.  done

I now put a fresh key in, reverse the process (flip dd if and of arguments).  Takes forever.  ANd then will not boot.

On a hunch I boot the netbook into clonezilla and make a backup of the key that way.  Much faster (odd, that).  Put in a fresh key, and reverse the process.  WAAAY faster than dd.  And it works.

I suspect I have tripped over one of the many gaps in my knowledge - can anyone enlighten me as to where I went wrong? 

BTW, once I got the key backed up with clonezilla, I stuck as many keys as I could into the netbook, and did the one to multiple restore.  quick.  Nice trick for making a bunch of keys, though I somehow suspoect this too is common knowledge. :/

[urkomasse]

Hi,

In my experience, adding bs=1M (or more, bs=4M) makes things go much faster with dd, especially when writing to a new key.

So it would be:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=my_key.img bs=1M
Put in a new key, and then:
dd if=my_key.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

I hadn't thought about using CloneZilla, but that one to multiple restore looks like a really neat way to get things going for the summer mass-imaging!

[pyperdown]

My tech is all smiles - we were imaging them (about 80 of 'em) with clonezilla and while it worked fine it was rather slow.  I did like 6 keys in 45 minutes.  Actually used one of the netbooks to clone the keys by booting to clonezilla and pointing at the key image I made.

[urkomasse]

We actually use Clonezilla, but we put Clonezilla and the image on the stick. In our case, it meant that we could use 4Gb sticks (that we already had in a significant number) instead of 8Gb. Our customized version has grown quite a bit, and Clonezilla seems to compress more than the standard Ubermix installer.

But I duplicate the sticks using dd, as I said above. It's fast enough for my needs so far. But I'll definitely give your idea of one to multiple a try.