Plugin your source drive and start USB Image Tool. To do this I used the application USB Image tool on windows. There are multiple guides on this but most of them show comments of not bootable sticks any more or that the partition layout is in the wrong order. Being lazy I did not want to reinstall it so I tried cloning. I was unable to write any data to the drive anymore but still was able to read data. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.In my lab, I had a broken USB drive. To complete a restore, simply insert a new USB key, launch the application and choose Write to UFD, select the file you made above and press Write to UFD. Congratulations you now have a backup of your FreeNAS USB Boot Drive (or WinPE image or anything else)

Select the USB drive, select Create from UFD (USB Flash Drive) and select an output file.

This is because the key contains a FreeBSD bootable image

In this case, you see that I have an 8GB USB Key with an Unknown File System.

Make sure the USB key you wish to copy is already inserted into your machine and run the application.

Notably, this software does not require installation and it’s a single standalone executable (yeah!).

It’s primary use case appears to be for mass duplication of USB drives (say to hand out at trade shows) but it has one feature in particular we want to take advantage of and that is the ability to save an image of a USB drive to a file. The software performed bit for bit duplication of a USB drive.

In my quest to do just this I discovered an excellent free piece of software called ImageUSB from Passmark.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just clone the USB key and be done with it? I got to thinking recently though – what happens if my USB key that I’m booting from fails? I manually periodically backup the configuration so I can restore that but that only works once I’ve gone through all the trouble of rebuilding a new FreeNAS installation. I’ve been running this way for years and it’s been fantastic. That’s obviously crazy and so the alternative is to simply boot off of USB.

This means if you have say 3 1.5TB drives, you have to allocate (and therefore lose) 1.5TB of disk space to host a couple of hundred meg of operating system. One of the catches to using FreeNAS is that you must dedicate an entire drive to the operating system. I have several RAID5 NAS devices at home that are built upon the excellent FreeNAS.

Cloning usb key