Preconditions Checking; Duplicating; Cloning; Imaging - Tableau TX1 User Manual

CHAPTER 4 Using the TX1

Preconditions Checking

Before starting duplications and other jobs, the TX1 automatically checks for preconditions.
Some preconditions produce warnings, and you can choose to continue or cancel after viewing
each one. Some preconditions are fatal and require that the duplication process be aborted.

Duplicating

The TX1 will duplicate one source drive to up to four destination drives simultaneously per job.
Up to two jobs can be active at any given time. For a given source/job, the destination drives
can be a mix of directly connected drives and network shares. The destinations can be a mix of
cloned and imaged copies.

Cloning

A clone, also known as a disk-to-disk duplication, makes an exact copy of the source drive to
the destination drive(s).
If a destination drive is not blank, the TX1 displays a yellow warning to indicate that a clone will
overwrite the contents of the destination drive. This reduces the risk of overwriting valuable
data.
There is no need to format the destination media, as the clone will apply the file system of the
source media (if one exists) to the destination media automatically. It is, however, a best
practice to wipe destination media before duplicating to it as this can help to identify
potentially defective media and bad sectors, and it can reduce the risk of cross-contaminating
a duplication with stale data.

Imaging

An image, also known as disk-to-file duplication, copies the source drive to a series of files
(sometimes called segments or chunks) on the destination drive. The TX1 supports EnCase file
formats Ex01 and E01 and raw file formats DD and DMG. Compression is supported, and
enabled by default, with Ex01 and E01 file formats. File sizes from 2 GB per segment to
Unlimited are supported. Smaller segments create more directory entries and Unlimited
creates one large file segment.
Note: Not all image file size options are available in all situations. Due to filesystem
addressing limitations, FAT32 formatted destinations have a maximum file size of 2
GB.
35