Re: Copying Debian to another drive

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On 1 Mar 2005, peace bwitchu wrote:
> --- João Lourenço <Joao.Lourenco@di.fct.unl.pt> wrote:
>
>> Be careful! "dd" only works if the two drives are of the same model
>> (or, at least, the same size).
>>
>> I would say "tar" is a better option. But remember to exclude the
>> virtual file systems "/proc" and "/sys".
>
> The drive you are dd'ing to has to be equal size or larger. If the
> second drive is larger you lose the space it is larger by. So if oyu
> have a 40 gig drive and dd it to a 45 gig drive you lose 5 gig.

Also, you keep the same fragmented allocation that will have gradually
built up on the old disk, and you have to resize partitions and
filesystems to take advantage of the new disk.

Why would anyone bother, honestly?  Using tar, which will happily stay
on one filesystem, or rsync, is a vastly superior solution.

Either of those will run at around half to two thirds the speed of the
raw dd as well, so unless half an hour of your life is worth that much
to you, I strongly advise against anything but copying files to a new
filesystem.

        Daniel

-- 
When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism;
if you steal from many, it's research.
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