It would be very nice to be able to rsync the raw data content of, e.g., a non-mounted disk partition, particularly in combination with --inplace.
Our reality: several dual-boot machines running Windows during the day and Linux at night, during backups. Windows is very tedious and iffy to re-reinstall without a raw disk image to start from. Disks fail, and the ensuing downtime must be minimized. We're using dd for this. Most of the nightly work is redundant and wasteful of elapsed time and storage. Storage is cheap, but it's not *that* cheap. Elapsed time is priceless. Rsync refuses to back up raw devices, and even raw character devices, with the message "skipping non-regular file" (I think the relevant message is in generator.c). In Linux, anyway, the "raw" command allows a block device to be bound as a character device, and then even a "cat" command can read the raw data of the block device. So why does rsync refuse to copy such content, or why is it a bad idea, or what rsync doctrine conflicts with it? I agree there are security concerns here, but rsync already disallows some of its functions unless the super user is requesting them.
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