On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 21:01, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
I've never had a problem on systems that have GNU cp (i.e. Linux) using 'cp --one-file-system -a ...' to copy complete filesystems as exactly as possible.
Some implementations of "cp" still take issue with special files. E.g., the default behavior of cp and most other UNIX utilities is to access devices nodes, not copy them as the raw device file.
In GNU cp, "-a" = "-dpR" which doesn't handle anything other than links, files and directories proper, which can be an issue.
'rsync --one-file-system -aH ...' will work too.
Again, once you start getting into device nodes and other, special files than links, file and directories, you can have problems.
Both handle special files/device nodes fine. There might be some cross platform issues, but since we are talking about replacing a drive that would not matter here.