Clone drive

Ask Fedora
1

I have a 2 tb dir partition 2 1 tb each. fedora is on the main partition. I want to clone the main partition to another 1 tb drive. How do I do that.

2

Welcome to ask.:fedora:edora @kimkostyna
Could you please give us more info’s as :

inxi -Fzx in terminal and post the output as </> Preformatted text here.

And if you not had time to read #start-here yet please take time to do so.

1 Like
3

What’s the purpose?
Do you need an exact clone or do you want to backup your data from disk1 to disk2?

for cloning, use dd (millions of guides online).

for backup, use rsync (or if you have ZFS or BTRFS filesystems, you can do a read-only snapshot and move that to the destination drive using the integrated send | receive functions)

Both programs have GUI versions, as far as I know gnome-disk can clone disks using dd in the background, and for rsync you could use Grsync.

But command line input will be better because you will have to learn how to do it and you will gain a better understanding of what’s happening.

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4

Thanks! I will check out your advice. Was looking for a program that completes all the dd commands a work involved. I want to clone the 1 tb partition from a 2 tb disk to a 1 tb drive. You gave me a suggestion. of gnome-disk. I will recheck that program as I didn’t see an option to do what I want. I though because windows (sorry for the swearing) had a program to just that but won’t do linux partitions. I think. Thanks again

5

Gparted is an other tool you can use.

6

When you want to do a one time clone, so that both partitions are equal at the very moment of cloning, you do not need much commands with dd but only one command.

E.g., if partition 1 is /dev/sda1 and partition 2 is /dev/sda2 (which are names usual for traditional file systems), the one dd command would be:
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda2 bs=1M
if → origin
of → target
bs = block size increase to 1M to ensure that the process is fast.

But ensure that both partitions are not mounted while doing dd!

But I do not understand your goal. Is this a backup? Be aware that this does not keep mirroring changes.

Also, be aware that dd is a big burden for your drive and your system performance, this should not be done daily or so. This would decrease the lifetime of the drive. Do you look for something that does backups/snapshots regularly?