On 10/06/2010 10:58 AM, Maxime Alarie wrote: > I have never used dd to clone a hard disk. > > > > I use rsync for a lot of my backups , and I was wondering what would > be the best tool to clone a disk. I don’t want 3^rd party software > also. I want built in command line tools. I use tar to migrate date from 1 drive to another. It can copy permissions and owners. For a short period, it did not copy context, but now it can. It will copy directory structures intact and copies links and symlinks as is (by default). tar --xattrs --selinux --one-file-system -cf - /dir | (cd /new/path; tar -xf -) should do the job as root user. You can even add the -S option to handle sparse file efficiently. > I know rsync will resync where it left off if I encounter a problem, > what about dd? Do I absolutely have to creat an image before cloning? > Ex: dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.img or I can use dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb? tar can be told to not overwrite old files (-k), but you probably *want* to overwrite the incomplete file where it previously died. > Thanks. -- Kevin J. Cummings kjchome@xxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org) -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines