I am running Fedora 26 from my 64GB USB Live flash drive. Looking for simple method to backup the entire drive to a matching 64GB USB drive. Thank you.

Hi:

Here's a simple command that you can use.

(Where /sdb1/ is you would indicate the name that fdisk -l gives it).

-::-With your matching 64 GB USB drive plugged in run fdisk -l as root to find out it's name.-::-

What do you mean by "live" flash drive ? Most live distributions are read only so there would be nothing to back up.

Quite empty on several fronts. What does "filename" refer to ? A user's home directory ? Also to backup an entire drive or home directory wouldn't cp -aR be used or rsync -a? The regular cp is not recursive and does not preserve all information.

Also the links in /dev/disk/by-label or /dev/disk/by-id are safer and quicker to use than fdisk and referring to raw device nodes. Also auto-mounts by udev in /media use file system labels if they exist so there is no need to refer to device nodes.

If you have a current working usb drive then you could clone it. Usually you want to clone from a different booted live media. Cloning live media may have some unexpected results.

Clonezilla or G4U sort of way should work. Be sure you read and understand what you are cloning from and to.

If you have a 3rd bootable live stick. Mount the one you want to copy. Create the partitions and filesystems on the to be copied to stick. Mount the to be copied to stick, and rsync. Adjust the /etc/fstab with the different UUID of the copied partition. Adjust the bootloader on the NEW stick and you should be good. Probably not that simple with lvm2 things like fedora. But generally everything on linux is a file, so filesystem, copies of files, done. YMMV.

TBH, it's probably simpler to use clonezille, ghost 4 linux (G4L), bacula or some other specialized tool that does most of it for you.