one upgrades to the superior HxC firmware and then its just copy/paste because no stupid partition per disk thing.

.. or FlashFloppy. 😉

Duplicating the content of USB pen drives should be akin to that of SSDs or HDDs, I believe.
Years ago I used Acronis True Image to move from one HDD to another.
Not sure if that also works the same with pen drives, also. Better check.

I do not own a Gotek, but I guess that dd (Linux) or win32diskimager (Windows) should do the trick. Any tool that can copy a disk block by block should work, but results are only guaranteed if both disks are the same size (=same number of blocks).

If the destination disk is smaller you'll loss data or maybe your system would be tricked into writing in non-existant areas; if the destination disk is bigger it will work but maybe you won't be able to use the last blocks of the disk until properly reformatted (i.e: if you put a image taken from a 8Gb pendrive into a 16Gb pendrive, maybe you could be able to access only the first 8Gb of the destination disk).

Those methods copy entire disks... you won't be able to select only part of the disks.

BloodyCactus wrote:

one upgrades to the superior HxC firmware and then its just copy/paste because no stupid partition per disk thing.

While that seems to solve the issue; using disk images makes it more difficult to modify existing floppies' contents on a different machine (without a GOTEK drive).
eg: adding a file to a floppy, or just creating a floppy with specific files.

aah. ok. I use linux, I just mount floppy images in the system or with dosbox if I need to add/update stuff.

I checked a few apps in Windows 10 and none see more than one partition of 1.4MB. The rest is seen as unpartitioned.

I confirmed yesterday that bulk disk backup and restore loses the boot sectors.