Can I use dd to clone two drives from two machines simultaneously?

Question

To clarify, I have two machines: Machine1 and Machine2. Each machine has 2 disks (Machine1 has Disk1-1 and Disk1-2; simiarly, Machine2 has Disk2-1 and Disk2-2). Can I use 'dd' to clone Disk1-1 to Disk2-1 and Disk1-2 to Disk2-2 simultaneously?

I'll be doing this over the network (with the help of 'netcat'), which is how I'll clone the machines.

So I was thinking of opening 2 terminals on each machine. One terminal on Machine1 will execute 'dd' for cloning Disk1-1 to Disk2-1, while the other terminal on Machine1 will execute another 'dd' for cloning Disk1-2 to Disk2-2.

I am wondering if this will be OK, i.e. not overload the machines as the I/O on both machines will be busy reading/writing from both disks. I'm just concerned about data integrity, the speed isn't an issue. I can wait a month if it takes that long. All the disks are 1TB.

Answer 1

Yes you can.

You have identified the limitations - you'll have contention for I/O and contention for the network traffic. But there should be no concern of overloading the I/O.