Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 16:07:35 -0700, Zac Medico wrote: > > >>The dd program knows nothing about partions but it will work with the >>associated device file. I would use fdisk, mke2fs, and rsync. > > > I'd go with rsync too. It may well be slower than tar, but it can be > interrupted and resumed. > > You can use dd for this, I have done so. As long as the new partitions > are larger than the old ones, you'll end up with a small filesystem on a > large partition, which you can then resize with the appropriate tool for > the filesystem. I wouldn't chance dd'ing a whole drive unless they are > identical, you could cause problems with the partition table. > > You should also note that dd is by far the slowest way of doing this, > partimage is a much better tool for cloning partitions. > >
Yeah, partimage is nice the way that it skips empty blocks. Can it clone directly from one partition to another or is an intermediate file required? I've found that squashfs is an iteresting option for doing backups/cloning because the compressed filesystem can also be reused to make a livecd or livedvd. For normal cloning, I mount the squashfs and use rsync to copy the files into a fresh ext3 partition. Zac -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
