Re: How best to copy the entire contents of one partition to…

Advantages of "cp -a":
    1. cp only copies allocated files, so if you have used 10GB of
       a 100GB partition, cp copies only the 10GB.
    2. When copying to a newly created filesystem, the resulting
       files are contiguous.  In the old days when fragmentation
       was more of a problem, copying to a new FS was a common
       defragmentation technique.
    3. Source and destination filesystems can be different sizes,
       as long as the destination FS is large enough to contain
       the files.
Advantages of dd (used as partition copy):
    1. Copies the raw partition blocks, so it works even when
       the filesystem has so much damage that cp can't work.
       It can backup a damaged filesystem before you attempt
       to repair it.
    2. Can read and write in large contiguous blocks, which can
       be faster than copying individual files.  This benefit
       is less than it used to be, because Linux is better
       than before at keeping files contiguous and coalescing
       disk writes.
    3. Reads/writes every block of the FS, so you can check for
       bad blocks.
    4. Can be used to copy a partition with an unsupported
       filesystem type, e.g. NTFS.

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$Eric \"Shubes\" at 2006-01-08 16:07$	Darrin Chandler at