[TAG] 2-cent Tip: Copying a partition

[Neil Youngman]

On or around Tuesday 20 March 2007 05:19, Kapil Hari Paranjape reorganised a 
bunch of electrons to form the message:
> Hello,
>
> Here is a way to copy a partition which is mounted *without* copying
> all the other partitions that are under it.
>
> Let /patha be the mountpoint of the partition from which you want to
> copy (it could even be the root path /).
>
> Let /dev/new be the device to which you want to copy the data.
>
> 	mkdir /var/tmp/src
> 	# The bind mount is the crucial thing!
> 	mount --bind /patha /var/tmp/src
> 	mkdir /var/tmp/target
> 	mount /dev/new /var/tmp/target
> 	cd /var/tmp/src
> 	# I find this a neat way to copy all files
> 	# and permissions
> 	find . | cpio -pdum /var/tmp/target
> 	umount /dev/new
> 	umount /var/tmp/src
> 	rmdir /var/tmp/{src,target}
>
> And you are done!
> I hope the above commands are self-explanatory. If not, then I can
> explain further.

I'm not sure what this does that wouldn't be done by 'cp -ax'?

Neil Youngman