Disk cloning
Disk cloning is the process of making an image of a partition or of an entire hard drive. This can be useful for copying the drive to other computers or for backup and recovery purposes.
- Moving to a drive with a smaller logical sector size (e.g. from 4096 bytes to 512 bytes) will require recreating the partition table since partition boundaries are specified in sector numbers.
- Moving to a drive with a larger logical sector size (e.g. from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes) may not be possible at all if a file system’s block size is less than target drive’s logical sector size or is not divisible by it.
Tip: Over time file systems get new features and the mkfs utilities change their defaults, but not all new features can be enabled without reformatting. So, when moving data to a new drive, instead of cloning the block devices or file systems, consider creating a new file system and only copy the files (and their attributes, ACLs, extended attributes, etc.) with e.g. rsync.
Block-level cloning
Using dd
Using ddrescue
If possible, data recovery from disks should be performed using their native interface: SATA or, for older drives, IDE. Results may vary while using USB adapters.
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool capable of ignoring read errors. ddrescue is not related to dd in any way except that both can be used for copying data from one device to another. The key difference is that ddrescue uses a sophisticated algorithm to copy data from failing drives causing them as little additional damage as possible. See the ddrescue manual for details.
To clone a faulty or dying drive, run ddrescue twice. For the first round, copy every block without read error and map the errors to rescue.map .
# ddrescue --force -n /dev/sdX /dev/sdY rescue.map
where X is the partition letter of the source and Y of the target block device.
For the second round, copy only the bad blocks and try 3 times to read from the source before giving up.
# ddrescue --force -d -r3 -n /dev/sdX /dev/sdY rescue.map
In some circumstances the disk controller or a USB adapter may lock, while attempting to read a particular sector. The -i option may be used to instruct ddrescue to start reading after that position.
Now you can check the file system for corruption and mount the new drive.
File system cloning
This article or section needs expansion.
Using e2image
e2image is a tool included in e2fsprogs for debugging purposes. It can be used to copy ext2, ext3, and ext4 partitions efficiently by only copying the used blocks. Note that this only works for ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and the unused blocks are not copied so this may not be a useful tool if one is hoping to recover deleted files.
To clone a partition from physical disk /dev/sda , partition 1, to physical disk /dev/sdb , partition 1 with e2image, run
# e2image -ra -p /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
Versatile cloning solutions
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Reason: This application list does not respect Template:App#Style and might be better as a table. (Discuss in Talk:Disk cloning)
These applications allow easy backup of entire filesystems and recovery in case of failure, usually in the form of a Live CD or USB drive. They contain complete system images from one or more specific points in time and are frequently used to record known good configurations. See Wikipedia:Comparison of disk cloning software for their comparison.
See also Synchronization and backup programs for other applications that can take full system snapshots, among other functionality.
- Clonezilla — A partition and disk imaging/cloning program which helps with system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
- Complete backup and recovery solution: able to image and restore entire drives including boot sector, bootloader, partition table. for different operating systems including Windows
- Supports BIOS and UEFI, MBR and GPT
- Supports most filesystems (ext2-3-4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs, FAT12-16-32, NTFS, HFS+, UFS and others) and LVM2
- Free-space aware when using Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), otherwise falls back to dd for block-level copying (dm-crypt/LUKS containers, unsupported filesystems. )
- Supports multi-threaded compression with different formats (including zstd) and levels
- Supports encrypting the backup
- Multicasting server to restore to many machines at once
- Dedicated LiveCD available to boot from CD, USB drive or PXE server
- Included on the Arch Linux installation media.
- Deepin Clone — Tool by Deepin to backup and restore. It supports to clone, backup and restore disk or partition.
- FSArchiver — A safe and flexible file-system backup/deployment tool
- Support for basic and extended file attributes
- Support for basic file-system attributes (label, uuid, block-size) for all linux file-systems
- Support for multiple file-systems per archive
- Support for all major Linux filesystems (extfs, xfs, btrfs, reiserfs, etc) and FAT (in order to backup/restore EFI System Partitions)
- Experimental support for cloning ntfs filesystems
- Checksumming of everything which is written in the archive (headers, data blocks, whole files)
- Ability to restore an archive which is corrupt (it will just skip the current file)
- Multi-threaded lzo, lz4, gzip, bzip2, xz/lzma and zstd compression
- Support for splitting large archives into several files with a fixed maximum size
- Encryption of the archive using a password. Based on blowfish from libgcrypt
- Support for restoring to a bigger or smaller partition (as long as there is enough space to store the data)
- Support for exclusion patterns to filter what is archived/restored
- Works with directories (creating a compressed and checksummed tarball of sorts)
- Included on the Arch Linux installation media
- Mondo Rescue — A disaster recovery solution to create backup media that can be used to redeploy the damaged system.
- Image-based backups, supporting Linux/Windows.
- Compression rate is adjustable.
- Can backup live systems (without having to halt it).
- Can split image over many files.
- Supports booting to a Live CD to perform a full restore.
- Can backup/restore over NFS, from CDs, tape drives and other media.
- Can verify backups.
- Partclone — A tool that can be used to back up and restore a partition while considering only used blocks.
- Supports ext2, ext3, ext4, hfs+, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, vmfs3, vmfs5, xfs, jfs, ufs, ntfs, fat(12/16/32), exfat, f2fs, nilfs
- Supports pipe, stdin and stdout to script special features (compression, encryption. )
- Rescue mode tries to skip bad blocks and backup only good blocks, option to create GNU Ddrescue domain log file from source device
- ncurses interface available
- All backed-up blocks are checksummed with crc32
- Included on the Arch Linux installation media
- Partimage — An ncurses disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments.
- Has a Live CD.
- Supports the most popular filesystems on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
- Compression.
- Saving to multiple CDs or DVDs or across a network using Samba/NFS.
- Development stopped in favor of FSArchiver.
- Redo Backup and Recovery — A backup and disaster recovery application that runs from a bootable Linux CD image.
- Is capable of bare-metal backup and recovery of disk partitions.
- Uses xPUD and Partclone for the backend.
- System Tar & Restore — Backup and Restore your system using tar or Transfer it with rsync
- GUI and CLI interfaces
- Creates .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz or .tar archives
- Supports openssl / gpg encryption
- Uses rsync to transfer a running system
- Supports Grub2, Syslinux, EFISTUB/efibootmgr and Systemd/bootctl
See also
How do I create a copy of a directory in Unix/Linux? [closed]
I want to recursively create a copy of a directory and all its contents (e.g. files and subdirectories).
3 Answers 3
The option you’re looking for is -R .
cp -R path_to_source path_to_destination/- If destination doesn’t exist, it will be created.
- -R means copy directories recursively . You can also use -r since it’s case-insensitive.
- To copy everything inside the source folder (symlinks, hidden files) without copying the source folder itself use -a flag along with trailing /. in the source (as per @muni764 ‘s / @Anton Krug ‘s comment):
cp -a path_to_source/. path_to_destination/i wonder why this exact command in dockerfile copies all source directory files into destination, instead of copying just whole directory.
I believe the ‘/’ on the end makes a difference and that might account for your experience. If the source includes the trailing slash it will copy what is in the directory only. If it does not include the trailing slash, it will copy the directory as well and then the contents inside of it. My memory is this behavior varies by command and maybe event by OS a bit. Here’s a reference with more info.
I would say if you don’t want to include the source and you want to make sure everything is copied (symlinks, hidden files) without copying the source parent folder is to use -ra source/. destination. This will make sure the content of the folder is copied, but not the parent folder itself, which is sometimes handy. And the difference is the /.
Note the importance of «Slash dot» on your source in cp -r src/. dest I know it is mentioned but I still seem to miss it every time.
You are looking for the cp command. You need to change directories so that you are outside of the directory you are trying to copy.
If the directory you’re copying is called dir1 and you want to copy it to your /home/Pictures folder:
Linux is case-sensitive and also needs the / after each directory to know that it isn’t a file. ~ is a special character in the terminal that automatically evaluates to the current user’s home directory. If you need to know what directory you are in, use the command pwd .
When you don’t know how to use a Linux command, there is a manual page that you can refer to by typing:
Also, to auto complete long file paths when typing in the terminal, you can hit Tab after you’ve started typing the path and you will either be presented with choices, or it will insert the remaining part of the path.
There is an important distinction between Linux and Unix in the answer because for Linux (GNU and BusyBox) -R , -r , and —recursive are all equivalent, as mentioned in this answer. For portability, i.e. POSIX compliance, you would want to use -R because of some implementation-dependent differences with -r . It’s important to read the man pages to know any idiosyncrasies that may arise (this is a good use case to show why POSIX standards are useful).