The easiest way to clone a Linux box

I really like Clonezilla for XP machines. It's Linux- based and I'm sure it would work well for Linux.

Supports disk-disk, partition-partition and disk or partition imaging to and from a network share.

And it's free.

g4u? (NetBSD based).

dd is ideal if the source and destination drives have identical sizes. Otherwise, you'll need to resize the filesystem afterwards (and if the destination is smaller than the source, you need to ensure that nothing is actually stored in the portion which isn't copied).

If cloning to a smaller drive, ordinarily I'd suggest: create a filesystem on the destination, copy the filesystem over with "cp -a", then install the boot loader. However, I don't know whether "cp -a" will copy SELinux attributes.

actually, dd has some drawbacks, and so the dd_rescue project was created. dd_rescue is much more robust, and can survive surface defects in creating the bit-image backup.

Having used Clonezilla, SystemRescue, g4u and dd_rescue (in addition to dd), I'd suggest g4u as being the simplest, and relatively fast.

Though it has the ability to clone an entire disk, or just a partition over the wire onto an ftp server, I'd suggest that you use a directly connected hard drive to hard drive copy if you drive is over 100GB, or you'll be waiting for quite some time.

If you copy a smaller drive to a larger one, you can then use SystemRescue (GParted) to re-size partion, or to re-allocate the unused portion of the drive.

I've just cloned an XP disk this week, and so this is fresh in my mind just now ... #@$@#$#, and I blogged about the experience:

HTH, Rob Sciuk