--On Monday, April 16, 2007 10:40 AM -0700 Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com> wrote: > You can set up the partitioning on the new drive, and use your favorite > poison to copy each partition. You can use rsync, cp -a, or tar, > whichever you are comfortable with. If the drives are close in size, you > can usually get away with dd, or G4L if you want something more visual. dump/restore in a pipeline would be my choice, at least if you're copying ext2 or 3 filesystems. You can see an example in old copies of the restore man page: <http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/restore.8.html> dump 0f - /usr | (cd /mnt; restore xf -) dump reads through the block device and restore writes through the filesystem. This will preserve holes in sparse files, because the holes can be detected in the raw filesystem format. When dump is mentioned, someone inevitably mentions that Linus disapproves of dump: <http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html>