Conezilla vs dd

[Brian Parma]

On 07/14/2011 02:06 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
>> 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.
>
If you're not using windows or FAT, you could give fsarchiver a shot, 
it's the successor to partimage, has a lot of features, and it seems 
like it would be quite a bit easier to use than clonezilla.

http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page