How best to copy the entire contents of one partition to another?

[Eric "Shubes"]

Dale Farnsworth wrote:

<snip>
> 
> dd will copy the full partition, block by block, rather than
> copying individual files.  It's almost always more appropriate to do
> "cp -a", unless fsck detects significant filesystem structure damage.

Why is that so? (please expound a bit)

> 
> -Dale

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'

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