this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Don't cp, use rsync!
why not?
sudo cp -ax
foots the bill.I assume people prefer rsync because you may need to run it twice, but unless you tick all the boxes rsync won't copy capabilities (see
getcap /usr/bin/rsh
)sudo cp -ax is short and sweet and does everything right.
Why not DD? Dd is agnostic to anything, just copy over the entire partition and you're golden
Man I always forget about dd and jump to gparted.
dd is good if the destination disk is equal or bigger, unless you are brave enough to shrink the source partition.
if you are moving to a smaller disk for whatever reason (hdd to sdd) then you need to fallback to a different method, which takes us back to cp/rsync.
I'm always hesitant to use the "disk destroyer", even as a regular user.
rsync
does a good job and it's maybe even more agnostic thandd
since it doesn't really care about the partition size, as long as all data fits.Because
cat
andcp
are faster if you don't pick a good block size fordd
.How are you supposed to use
cat
to copy files?cat
ting binary files does, interesting things.You cat the device files of the partitions directly into each other.
cat /dev/sda/ > /dev/sdb
?rsync
is also more reliable: in cases the transfer is interrupted it only transfers what's missing and it can run the checksums making sure there were no transfer errors. I don't see a good reason to usecp
.@CAPSLOCKFTW @anonono of I rsymc an entire drive, does it preserve all attributed and partitions, or does it just sync a particular file system.
You can only rsync a file system, you have to do the partioning beforehand. It does preserve all attributes though, if you use the right flags.