On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:40 -0600, "Yaron" <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote: > On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, PJ Crump wrote: > > Any one have an suggestions for open source Cloning tools? > Well the super-simple way is dd. But that only really works on very > similar sized drives. I copy drives like that all the time. Using standard Unix utilities: dd works great for backing up on the device level. This means that if you back up a 2Gb partition using the device file, e.g. /dev/sdb3, then the restore will write back a 2Gb partition image to the location you specify, so most likely you'll be writing back to the device file of a new partition. This also works at the disk level, so you can back up the entire disk with all partitions by referencing the device file, e.g. /dev/sdb. For backing up at the file system level, you can still use dd but it makes more sense to use a utility that reads the file system such as tar. This allows you to limit your backup to specific files and directories.