this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You can, it will copy until it runs out of source or runs out of destination so it's very simple to use for stuff like this. Performance also tends to be very good because it chooses some good defaults for block size and so on, unlike dd where you have to choose by hand.
dd also has some issues that you have to be aware of such as the fact it will always fill full blocks by default. For example if you choose 1M blocks and your source is 1.5M it will write 2M. It's not a problem in a scenario like I described where the new disk is larger and empty and that extra 0.5M will go unnoticed, but if you had some other partition past the 1.5M mark it may potentially mess it up. You have to use a flag to make it write exactly what it reads ("fullblock" I think – yeah that's intuitive; unless they changed it and now it's reversed by default? I don't even know).
So yeah overall dd is more trouble than it's worth unless you're prepared and need to control the copy super-exactly.