Clonezilla local disk to local disk has worked well for me. It also automatically fixes GRUB and fstab so you don't need to worry about those things. Boot params and such can get a bit hairy.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Fixing grub and fstab makes it very newbie friendly compared to other methods.
Clonezilla is the answer. It has all the options, and just works right the first time
https://askubuntu.com/questions/741723/moving-entire-linux-installation-to-another-drive
I personally like the Clonezilla and the dd command answers. Timeshift is also a way. Don't forget to update /etc/fstab with new UUIDs.
Boot from a USB drive, then use DD to copy the entire disk over and resize the partitions if necessary.
What if I want to clone an installation from a 2 TB drive (that is less than half full) to a 1 TB drive? Would I have to resize then dd?
Yes.
dd + partition resize is a bit overkill. You can use cp -ax to copy at file level instead of disk level. Or, if you really want to clone the partition, using cat is faster than dd.
dd can be fast if you experiment with and pick the right block size, but ofc doing that would take extra time.
You have to create and configure partitions and file systems if you do it at the file level. It also may not work if you're using disk encryption. There's a greater chance of having functional differences due to permissions, ownership, linking, etc doing things at the file level - though it SHOULD be fine but why bother if block device level is viable.
Did not know cat could be used that way.
I would go with clonezilla or dd. Always making a backup first. Do you have a tirth drive for it?
One argument against using DD is that sometimes the optimized default flags for FS creation change between kernel releases so its nice to take the opportunity when getting a new drive to reformat partitions. In addition to this, dd is slow if you haven't completely filled up the partition because it doesn't attempt to use fs metadata to seek sparse data on disk and instead copies all bytes of the partition. (Completely unnecessary and just causes extra wear on solid state medium)
I use rsync instead of cp so I get verbose messages, hash checks, and resume functionality during large copies. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync#File_system_cloning
it's not the recommended way but it's how I've been doing.
you format the new drives and just cp -a -x from the running os to the destination, update the destination fstab, then treat the new drives as an os with a broken boot and continue from there.
Don't cp, use rsync!
why not? sudo cp -ax foots the bill.
I assume people prefer rsync because you may need to run it twice, but unless you tick all the boxes rsync won't copy capabilities (see getcap /usr/bin/rsh)
sudo cp -ax is short and sweet and does everything right.
Why not DD? Dd is agnostic to anything, just copy over the entire partition and you're golden
Man I always forget about dd and jump to gparted.
dd is good if the destination disk is equal or bigger, unless you are brave enough to shrink the source partition.
if you are moving to a smaller disk for whatever reason (hdd to sdd) then you need to fallback to a different method, which takes us back to cp/rsync.
I'm always hesitant to use the "disk destroyer", even as a regular user. rsync does a good job and it's maybe even more agnostic than dd since it doesn't really care about the partition size, as long as all data fits.
Because cat and cp are faster if you don't pick a good block size for dd.
How are you supposed to use cat to copy files? catting binary files does, interesting things.
You cat the device files of the partitions directly into each other.
cat /dev/sda/ > /dev/sdb?
rsync is also more reliable: in cases the transfer is interrupted it only transfers what's missing and it can run the checksums making sure there were no transfer errors. I don't see a good reason to use cp.
@CAPSLOCKFTW @anonono of I rsymc an entire drive, does it preserve all attributed and partitions, or does it just sync a particular file system.
You can only rsync a file system, you have to do the partioning beforehand. It does preserve all attributes though, if you use the right flags.
if you are using btrfs. try btrfs send
I think that this may be the best way. The others that come to mind are use of dd or Clonezilla.