Michael Schuerig posted on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:21:01 +0200 as excerpted: > SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an > unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The > disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!) > subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots > subdirectory. > > As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to > duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I can use > cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm > missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs > send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an > example of its usage. > > If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However, > I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course, > most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.
It's not a btrfs tool, but several of the tools you mentioned aren't, and you didn't mention dd (or ddrescue, if your source device starts giving you issues while you're cloning). Using it you'd clone the entire raw device, including any not yet allocated areas, in a straight-across bit- perfect copy. Of course you'd need a target of either the same size or larger in ordered to do so... That should give you a bit-perfect copy including the filesystem UUIDs, etc, which will confuse btrfs if you try to mount anything btrfs with both devices attached, so don't. Do your clone, then umount and disconnect the old device before trying to mount the new one. In fact, there are entire purpose-built special live-image distributions such as Clonezilla for managing storage devices like this. http://clonezilla.org/ Or use a more general purpose "rescue" live-image distro such as SysRescue: http://www.sysresccd.org/ Both of these tools support MS Windows systems as well. Image-cloning is of course OS-agnostic -- what's on the cloned image doesn't matter, just whether the source device is readable and the destination writable. And sysrescue is often used in the MS world to reset lost passwords and etc. I used to use it for that back when I still worked on friends' MS systems for "gratis" (well, traded for a good dinner or whatever), before I decided that wasn't a worthwhile use of my time, tho I'd be happy to teach them about Linux if they wanted, or might still do it if they paid me enough, but then there's other computer repair services that will do that if they're willing to pay. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
