On Monday 07 June 2010 19:54:04 meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:
> Andrea Conti <alyf@alyf.net> [10-06-07 20:28]:
> > > Does anyone has experiences with gparted?
> >
> > I have no experience with Parted Magic, but I have used a lot the
> > Gparted live CD (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php). No idea on
> > how the two compare.
> >
> > As for gparted (which is a lot more than a gui for parted), I have used
> > it on ext4 a couple of times and it managed to complete the copy without
> > destroying anything, so I'd say it works. On the other hand, I copied
> > *lots* of ext3 and ntfs partitions, and it never failed me.
> >
> > BTW, by default gparted does *not* do sector-by-sector partition copies.
> > In my opinion this is a much better approach if you do not need a
> > bit-exact copy of the original (e.g. if you're doing forensics or
> > debugging filesystems), but in the end it's up to you.
> >
> > andrea
> 
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> do I understand right here:
> Instead of using dcfldd or simply dd to copy one disk to
> another for backup reasons it is much better/faster to use gparted
> to simply copy all partitions from sda to sdb using sda1=>sdb1,
> sda2=>sdb2,... and so forth?
> Is there something like a "batch job" or scripting interface
> for gparted so that I can give gparted the complete copy job
> once, go to sleep and next moring the copy is done?
> Is gparted able to shut down the system after finishing its
> work or to end itsself so a little script can detect the
> job is done and halt the system then?

Am I being old-fashioned, or is there anything wrong with rsync (if not 
tar/star) for this purpose?  Make sure to add the relevant option for sparse 
files and only bits and bytes with data will be copied over.  Therefore it 
will be faster than dd at any rate.
-- 
Regards,
Mick