> Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:43:13 +0100 > From: Aleksandar Kuktin <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [blfs-support] Complete Backup of {,B}LFS > . . > > > > > This looks really interesting and I want to "play" with it. But what > > I want *is* a clone, an exact copy, of what I have now. > > > > Dan > > > > Well, in that case, dd is probably your friend. > > dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/destination bs=512 > > Ofcourse, this only works if the destination partition is at least as > big as the source partition. For best results, the two should be > identical. If destination is bigger than the source, the extra space > in the destination will be unused. I think I read somewhere that some > program from e2fsprogs can be used to resize ext2/ext3 filesystems, but > don't take my word for it. The other way of reclaiming the dead space
- 'resize2fs', part of e2fsprogs pkg. (Has worked well here over the years, primarily used as part of resizing logical-volumes). > is to resize partitions however this is a very touchy procedure, may > not work on EFI/UEFI systems (depending on how they actually physically > store partition information) and requires manually calculating offsets > and filesystem and partition sizes. I did this once or twice (including > recovering my HDD after accidentally overwriting the partition table) > and can walk you through the process, but unless you *need* or *want* > the modification timestamps on you directories to be exactly the same > as on the original filesystem, you are much better off using cpio. > > Note that you can also clone devices with cat (and probably a host of > other even more convoluted methods): > cat < /dev/source > /dev/destination > ...but dd is better because it prints out exact statistics on what it > did while cat either prints nothing at all or just spits out a terse > and not entirely informative error string. > > On the subject of cloning filesystems (as opposed to cloning devices), > I come up blank with names of programs that can do that, even though > there is probably at least one program that can do that. > 'e2image' (part of e2fsprogs pkg) might be partly of some use there, in the wider-picture: but I'd say for the present task you really want dd or the find/cpio combination; either of them will do the job just fine. If you need 100% identical data - incl metadata, timestamps, &c - then I'd say use dd. Whereas, working at the filesystem-level - as you normally would with find/cpio, cp, tar, cat, &c - you run the 'risk' of at least some metadata (e.g. timestamps on dirs) being changed in source &/or target. IME, for working at the filesystem-level, the find/cpio combination will get you 100% identical data-copy (I've never encountered find/cpio 'choking' on any filesys-objects), and near-100%-identical metadata-copy (e.g. via those '-a' & '-m' cpio flags). hth, akh -- -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
