On 05/05/2011 10:41 AM Robert Heller wrote:
At Thu, 05 May 2011 10:10:52 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On 05/05/2011 08:01 AM Brunner, Brian T. wrote:
centos-bounces@centos.org wrote:
At Thu, 05 May 2011 07:44:52 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On 05/05/2011 07:13 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Is there a standard way of copying a working system from one machine to another with different partitions?
You could also utilize cloning software, such as the client version of drbl, clonezilla livecd.
You could also do a direct copy with dd onto a connected drive.
Warning: dd is not a good choise if the source and desination drives/partitions are *different* sizes.
Different block mappings will also give you grief. .:. The drives must be identical manufacturer and model, down to the firmware revision. dd is not a backup tool in the general sense.
...
Hmmm.... Using dump & restore (or tar or rsync or cpio, etc.) would likely be a lot faster. Esp. if the disk is not 100% full. Remember, dd will copy even the unused free blocks (which is a total waste of time). And dump & restore will likely use a more optimal block size, which will copy the data faster as well...
Speed is good sometimes. But I was probably either sleeping or watching TV during those eight to ten hours, so the length of time to do the copy didn't matter at all.
The most time-consuming part of the job was finding the particular command with the correct args that actually worked-- not the command or utility that "should" work or that "theoretically ought to" work-- but one which in fact *did* work. So if anyone actually finds a faster way to clone a system-- meaning they've run the command(s), and done the testing to determine that it was successful-- I'm all ears. The other possibilities are interesting, but given what my schedule is like, unless success with something else is 99.9% assured, I'll probably do it the same way again next time. Hey, what can I say...? I like success.