Hi everyone,

Previously, I used the following command to successfully clone one external drive to another:

sudo dd if=/dev/sd* of=/dev/sd* bs=1024k status=progress

I'm wondering if there might be any issues if I attempt to clone my running system to an external drive using this method?

Thanks.

You need to boot from an external media for this method. Technically it is possible to back up your live drive, but you have to combine dd and other copy methods, and you must exclude virtual filesystems like /proc, /dev and /sys. For EFI systems you do not need dd at all.

Thanks. Had a feeling that might be the case.

If I boot from a USB stick, will that be fine?

That's one type of external media, so yes.

1 members found this post helpful.

What do mean by saying "For EFI systems you do not need dd at all"?

1 members found this post helpful.

You can back up your EFI partition with plain 'cp -a'. Other filesystems as well. With dd you will have a huge image, it will copy the free space, too. With cp method you can create directories (boot, root, home) in your backup media and copy your files over. Will use much less space and won't take ages. Then you can use rsync to update your backup any time you wish, it will take a minute or two. Granted, restoring from such backup involves editing fstab and bootloader conf to replace UUID's. But how often you restore from full backup? Besides, you can set up your system using labels instead of UUID's. Then when you prepare new disk to replace failing drive you create filesystems with same labels and everything works right out of the box. With cp method you can even back up a live system if you know what you are doing. I personally do even less, I back up only user files and configuration files. Restoring from such backup is more work. But again, how often one needs to do full restore? Hasn't happened to me in last ten years. Imagine, if I was backing up 6-7 computers using dd over ten years. How much work that would have been? Nono, in my opinion dd backups are clumsy, time consuming and not practical.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'd suggest just use clonezilla as that is what it is used for. Write that to your USB drive and follow the instructions after booting from it. Worked fine for me.

1 members found this post helpful.