Assuming you're dealing with a POSIX-style filesystem. If you're cloning a Windows installation, for example, this is unlikely to work. In that case though, I recommend investigating ntfsclone (part of the ntfsprogs package on Debian). AIUI it only copies the populated parts of the ntfs data without messing with it too much.

Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
Matthew Cengia <mattcen@gmail.com> wrote:

I've not used CloneZilla before, but if you've only got to do this once,
I'd probably just do it with dd and netcat:

If you don't mind creating partitions you can do it more efficiently with
rsync by running a live distribution from a CD/DVD/USB device on the
destination machine, allowing an ssh connection to be established. Then create
the partitions and file systems, mount them and use rsync to transfer the
files across.

I've done this for backup. Instead of excluding, e.g., /proc and /sys, I just
bind mount the actual file systems on the machine to be backed up, then run
rsync.

It's a little more work than copying the drives them
 selves,
but it only copies
actual files and you don't have to reboot the system to be copied. File modes
and ownership are preserved by the -a option to rsync.


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