On 14/01/18 10:01, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On Sunday, 2018-01-14 at 10:29 +0100, Per Jessen wrote:
All,
Prepping for 42.2 to 42.3 update (yes, I'm actually going to try -- rather than clean install), I want to dump an image of my current 42.2 system to a spare 1T drive. I never do this (other than brute force dd images or shove the spare drive in an use parted to copy partitions).
What is the current favorite (FOSS) disk imaging utility being used. I'm not looking for long - HOWTO answers, just a project name to go look at.
You probably don't need an image, but just a filesystem copy. 'rsync' or 'tar' is the answer.
An image is faster for doing full recovery, and it also covers the booting. No thinking needed ;-)
Unless your disk sizes are different ...
If the files backup is to hard disk, rsync is more advantageous than tar; easier to recover a single file, a redo only copies the modifications, more resilient to errors, can do CRC checksums...
And is more complicated ... plus once rsync starts having to handle hard links things get messy and run-times can explode :-(
A dd runs faster than a full rsync - for each file the directory table and an inode have to be written on another place of the disk, so head movements. A disk image like dd writes many contiguous tracks.
My favourite if I'm making a copy on a different size disk would be a simple "cp -a" with whatever the option is to stop it following mount points. Only good if the disk you are copying to is clean, though. Cheers, Wol -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org