Conezilla vs dd

[Matt Graham]

> On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>> I was wondering if the list has a preference for clonezilla over a plain
ol'
>> dd to clone a drive.
From: Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com>
> I like clonzilla for base metal backups. very handy with windows based OS's
> dd is great for anything else.

If a filesystem is < 90% full, a filesystem-based tool like partimage will be
a lot faster than using dd.  dd copies *everything*, including stuff that you
don't need to copy, like free sectors.  If it's a Linux system, it'd be faster
to just mke2fs -j the partitions on the new disk, cp -a the stuff off the old
disk, and reinstall the bootloader.  (dd's brainlessness makes it suitable for
weird filesystems or partitions without filesystems, though.)

Windows is another can of worms full of Pandora's boxes.  You need something
like partimage or clonezilla to transfer that to another disk, because some
files in Windows have hardcoded sector positions and must be exactly in those
positions.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see