On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 10:14 AM Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sunday, 31 March 2019 12:32:55 BST Andreas Fink wrote: > > On Sun, 31 Mar 2019 11:53:19 +0100 > > > > Wols Lists <antli...@youngman.org.uk> wrote: > > > If I'm booting off a live-CD or similar, then I'm not worried about the > > > system being available for use, and streaming the data at a level BELOW > > > the file system is far more efficient and quicker. > > > > It's only faster if your disk is almost fully used. If you have a lot of > > free disk space your method is doing a dumb clone of unused space. So it's > > argueable which method is faster ;) > > Your method neither allows changing of partition sizes nor a change on the > > underlying filesystems. Maybe it's worth thinking about about another > > filesystem, when you switch from classic HDD to SSD. > > > > Cheers > > Andreas > > partclone is a more intelligent solution than dd, skipping any free disk space > to clone a complete disk, or if required individual partitions. Unlike rsync > it will copy over partition boot records thus retaining UUIDs, which means > MSWindows should be able to boot again without needing to use BCDedit et al. >
There is also clonezilla, which features bootable images and is basically a GUI wrapper around a bunch of FOSS partition imaging/etc tools. I believe that it can resize partitions and so on, at least for the linux-oriented ones. I'm not sure if it can resize NTFS. I think it uses partimage (which I'm guessing is related to partclone), which uses free-space mapping combined with block-level backups. That makes it good for backing up filesystems where full drivers are not available - as long as the software can figure out which blocks are discardable it can do a block-level backup efficiently without the need to completely decipher the filesystem layout. -- Rich
