Re: How to migrate a Debian system to another hard drive?

[Mark Eichin]

and note that unlike tar, cp -a will actually *handle* pathnames over
100 characters (of course, dpkg won't have installed any, but they may
be around for other reasons...)  I used the tar approach for years,
but cp -a turns out to be much more reliable (and I can fall back to
tar if I have to -- knowing that I have to keep an eye on it as well
and diff the trees later...)