dd - cloning a disk.

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 3/12/06, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.3miasto.net> wrote:
> >
> > It is, with a few 'buts'. Firstly, the source should be mounted
>
> but may not - unless system is generally idle. fsck will be checking the
> copy then, but with success.

No matter what fsck says later, it's too dangerous. A FreeBSD
system (as well as any other complicated OS) is never really
idle in terms of disk I/O.


On 3/12/06, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.3miasto.net> wrote:
> > list sometime in the last 3-5 weeks.  Giorgios Keramidas
> > commented that "dd" was too slow for his tastes and
>
> dd is the fastest, but probably he used small block size. 64K is OK

dd can be slower than dump/restore in quite a few cases,
especially when disk is far from full.