Since I returned to the office in 2022 after the remote work mandate was lifted, I have been using portable Linux desktops that I made.
These are convenient USB drives with persistence that I boot and so I can circumvent the restrictions (not to mention the spying) in the Windows desktop.
Anticipating that the USB drive can eventually fail, I have made several copiesÑ I have two MX Linux machines and two Mageia machines.
Even though I synchronize document files using FreeFileSync, I need to make absolutely sure that all the settings of OBS studio are updated, and since I keep changing the configuration for the didactic live streams, the best solution is to clone the USB drive machine I have been using to the backup USB drive machine from time to time.
Doing so is very easy. First, I plug the source USB and open the Mageia Control Center just to make sure which is the source device (I need this machine in dev/sdb). After that, I plug the other USB drive, which is the backup. This is the target USB (the system must identify the target device as /dev/sdc).
Then I open Konsole in Mageia and type su and my password to be able to type this command:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress
The status=progress part lets you see how things are going while dd is doing the copy, otherwise the command line gives no feedback and, since the process takes a long time, one might think that nothing is happening.