So I just tried to clone the Wii U HDD using Acronis and it did not work. The HDD is not recognised/initialised and therefore cannot be cloned.
Now I am "cloning" it using the Wii u Data Management tool on the Wii u itself. And since it only has a USB 2.0 controller (and not a fast one, that's for sure) it takes forever.
Just copying 19GB of data (Xenoblade Chronicles X) to the other USB device took almost 30 minutes which makes sense (28 MB/s for the USB 2.0 controller divided by 2 because there is 14 MB/s read and 14 MB/s write at the same time).
That's a bummer because all the HDDs are USB 3.0 capable
Guess I have to leave the system on over night.
You can dump a RAW image of the entire drive using tools like Paragon. You need to clone the entire drive not just the first partition. You will probably need the exact some make/model of drive to clone to. It's just easier to buy a 200GB sd card and a spare USB hard drive and install your games again if the first drive becomes corrupted.
Last edited by cots,