[GLLUG] Dual-Boot Copy?

Richard Houser rick at divinesymphony.net
Wed Oct 31 20:20:39 EDT 2007


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> I'm a big fan of the KISS principle.  dd the drive to the new one and
> resize the file systems, that's all you need to do.

As an image based copy, dd has the downside of transmitting all data,
not just what's in the filesystem.  So, 1GB of data on a 500GB drive
would be 500GB of data to copy via dd or 1GB of data to copy via rsync
or tar.  Dd will also copy deleted data, so there might be security
concerns as well.

In addition, dd will not allow you to change filesystem options like
block size or special features like "tails", will keep any fragmentation
or corruption, etc.  At a minimum, a filesystem based copy will detect
these errors.  In the case you have a corrupt filesystem, making an
image with dd before attempting repair can be the difference between a
hosed partition or not.

The KISS method would actually favor creating the partition as desired
and then copying the data to it.  Doing a larger copy then resize is a
lot more complicated and resource intensive of an operation (not simple
in any means).  In fact, back around 1999, that was just the way you did
it, period (not all filesystems even supported resizing then).
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