Hi, On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 02:13:54PM +0100, alain williams wrote: > If your purpose is backup - then you are *far* better mounting the disk as a > file system and then copying files somewhere using tar or cpio. That somewhere > could be a disk - although something like a USB memory stick would be better > as > these are more robust and smaller than a hard disk.
Though if the goal is disk imaging there are some complications with tar: - By default doesn't preserve extended attributes unless you make use of some quite obscure options that you'll have to look up in the documentation: --xattrs --xattrs-include='*.*' (both required, no I can never remember this) - Doesn't make the destination bootable Not even sure if cpio can handle extended attributes at all. I think an inexperienced user is probably better off with a dedicated disk/partition copying tool, or just swallowing the whole dd. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
