[CentOS] How to copy a system?

[Devin Reade]

--On Thursday, May 05, 2011 10:41:04 AM -0400 Robert Heller
<heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Hmmm.... Using dump & restore (or tar or rsync or cpio, etc.) would
> likely be a lot faster.

+1 for dump & restore.  It's been around for years, is lightweight
(in terms of minimal dependencies), and is absolutely solid.  I've
had good success in moving dump images to new hardware as long as
your hardware is similar (ie: not mixing Intel/AMD), and those aren't
problems with dump/restore but rather the OS that you're copying.
For a straight clone, the recovery steps would generally be:
  - partition your new drive and create the new filesystems
  - use restore to extract your data
  - reinitialize your boot blocks (MBR or whatever)
  - boot the system

I don't know of any UNIX that doesn't ship with it (although there
are variations among the UNIX flavours).

The assumption is that your're backing up on a per-filesystem basis,
as file exclusion for dump is rudimentary.

With file-based copy schemes like tar, rsync, cpio, etc, you have better 
control for file exclusions, but you need to make sure you're paying
attention to how you handle symlinks, hard links and other
"unusual" file setups.

No opinion on clonezilla.

Devin