Transferring my install to new computer

[Liam Proven]

On 24 June 2012 16:45, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
> Liam Proven wrote:
>> That's true, but surely any vaguely smart filesystem-imaging tool will
>> only copy occupied space?
>
> A filesystem imaging tool would be expected to copy the filesystem
> which includes the 'empty' space[0]. If you're only interested in the
> extant files you'd normally use a file copy program.

Hmm. I am not sure about the likes of GParted, which I have found to
be very slow and not progress significantly quicker on near-empty
partitions than on near-full ones. More mature tools like
PartitionMagic certainly only copy occupied space and it takes about
10% of the time to copy a 100MB partition with 10MB used than a 100MB
partition that's full.

But these are partition /copiers/ not /imagers./ Tools like partclone
or fsarchiver don't copy partition-to-partition but partition-to-file
or file-to-partition. I have used both quite a lot recently and found,
as I'd expect, that copying a smallish near-full partition is slow and
gives a large data file whereas copying a large but nearly-empty
partition is much quicker and yields a very small image file. This is
what I'd expect - that unused space is ignored.

> [0] I imagine may would have an option to not, but it's not uncommon to
> take an image of the disc precisely to take interest in the
> unoccupied space, such as when recovering deleted files.

That sounds more like a data-recovery or forensics tool, which is a
different category of application, at least in my book.

-- 
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