I try to copy a file (16MB) from the master-SD-card onto the slave-SD-cards. This would work through the “Clone drive” function. However, it does take a lot of time, as it clones the whole card (128GB) and not only the file on it.
My question: is there is a way to simply copy-paste the file from the master- to the slave-SD-cards with the BalenaEtcherPro-device.
If not currently possible, could that be implemented in a future software update?
Thank you very much for your answer.
Hello @simg welcome to the balena community!
Sadly, at the moment, there is no way to do so. You can either clone the whole drive which copies the whole drive regardless if the drive is ‘full’ or ‘empty’ or flash a particular file. This idea was discussed in the past but is not yet implemented for priority reasons.
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A more generic feature to add to the EtcherPro is a “Copy Drive” function.
This would be different than “clone drive” in the following way:
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The source USB device is selected.
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If a receiving device is categorized as “too small”, the user is presented with an option to trim one partition by the few KB or MB needed to be mostly equivalent
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the partition scheme is copied over, followed by the file contents
This process would be much quicker if the contents are only a couple GB on a 128GB drive, for example, since, empty sectors are not copied.
@mpous is this the function that was previously discussed, but not prioritized?