That was my idea over the holiday...still hasn't happened and it was also an idea to test out dd using my Mint laptop rather than win32image on a spare W7 laptop which takes 3 hours to read and write an image.
Good grief, 3 hours? With 2 drives, it's no wonder why you've been reluctant to clone. I've been reading and writing 32GB images to/from drives in roughly 30 minutes each way (1 hour). (If you're not using h2testw_1.4 to "precertify" the destination drive as error free, Win32Diskimager can do a secondary verification after a write.) In my case, I've using a fairly quick client, and I'm using USB 3.0 drives in 3.0 ports. For speed, that can make a difference.
Still, from a process point of view, this is yet another reason why having 3 boot drives is a real good idea.
- Take the server down - 30 seconds
- Boot on the master (the 3rd drive) - 1 minute or so
- Take all the time you need to read your working drive and write the 2nd drive. (Since all NAS functionality is on the master, it could stay in overnight if needed.)
- On the other side - take it down, pull the master, and you're back up on the 2nd drive. It's 1.5 to 2 minutes, you're back to normal, and everything has been tested.
And while 32GB is no small file to keep, the image file is yet another backup that one can use to write over and over. Now that I have a butt load of storage, I'm thinking about archiving the major changes so I can drop way back if needed or if corruption slips in at some point. What can I say? I'm conservative.