So I have a pile of older hard drive I would like to create an archive of using Unraid. Any suggestions on the best way to approach this? The drives are mostly old Laptop drives, but the file systems vary, MacOS, NTFS and XFS. Ideally, I would like to create a complete image of each drive that I can then mount (as read-only) and access data from if required. 

 

I don't need the disk images to be bootable, but I would like them to be as accurate as possible and preserve the old file system, partition structure, etc. 

 

I am trying to avoid the old "I had that file on my desktop two laptops ago" scenario where data wasn't copied over correctly to a new device. Some also have old raw test data that I don't need right now, but might in the future. 

 

 

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to do this? Is there a drive archiving or forensics package I can run to do this automatically?

You can use dd to create images, and them mount them (if the fs is supported by Unraid)

Have a look at software like ImgBurn.   

 

 

31 minutes ago, Richard Baguley said:

but I would like them to be as accurate as possible and preserve the old file system, partition structure, etc. 

I can't understand this is even necessary.  You are after the data files--right.  As long the files are on the same location, that should be sufficient.  If you require more than this, perhaps the is to built a special secure storage container with a designate  storage slot for each disk and its description. 

4 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Have a look at software like ImgBurn.   

Does that support hard drives? I thought it was just for optical drives

 

4 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

 

I can't understand this is even necessary.  You are after the data files--right.  As long the files are on the same location, that should be sufficient.  If you require more than this, perhaps the is to built a special secure storage container with a designate  storage slot for each disk and its description. 

 

I agree that it is paranoid, but I've lost too much data by not realizing it wasn't copied over, or that it was in a separate partition for some reason.