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A little backstory; my brother upgraded the internal drive of his PS4 to a 2TB Seagate SSHD and the drive ended up dying. He somehow managed to disable automatic cloud backups for his game save data (even though he pays for PS+), so he potentially lost everything. Luckily the drive was within warranty, and Seagate said they would try to recover the drive if I send it in. It looks like they successfully recovered the drive, and returned it to him.

The issue is that they sent the drive back to him in an external "Backup Plus Ultra Touch"; which I could teardown to get at the standard SATA drive inside, but I'd rather not do that. The risk of damaging the drive makes me apprehensive, plus I would lose a perfectly good 2TB external drive (though I could still probably repurpose it, assuming I don't break it).

I was hoping to duplicate the disk directly to the internal drive Seagate also sent him as a replacement for the defective one. But it is proving to be more difficult than I thought.

Sony seems to lock down the internal drives; apparently they're locked to the PS4 they were formatted on, and it is "unreadable" on macOS, Linux, and Windows. I can't seem to copy the data at all as I don't have read permissions (it's set to brw-r-----). I'm also afraid to mess with the drive too much, and risk the PS4 not being able to read it.

I also tried using SuperDuper! to clone the drive, but since the drive is in (what I'm assuming is) a proprietary format it doesn't show up in Finder to select as a drive to copy from. It only shows up in Disk Utility.

Has anyone attempted this? Or have any suggestions as to how I can duplicate this disk?

Bryan
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1 Answers1

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Superdisk appears to be more of a "system backup" tool than disk cloning, and is aware of the filesystem and avoiding duplicating parts of the disk that it knows are empty. In theory it is faster for that particular method as you are not copying unused sectors, but it's not that helpful for encrypted or otherwise "unknown" disk formats. As it doesn't understand the disk format it seems it completely ignores it.

I would use something like Clonezilla to do a sector by sector raw "full disk" copy. You should be able to copy the drive in its entirety to another drive using an external caddy. Clonezilla is a bit more generic and you can essentially say "I don't care what you think is there, just copy everything." as a raw disk.

It would take a lot longer than simply dismantling the drive though. USB2 has a limit of ~40MB/s and at best this answer to How long would it take to transfer 1TB over USB 2.0? seems to suggest that 1TB would take around 8 hours...

Mokubai
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