David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 23:07:55 -0400, Paul wrote:
When Macrium clones, it also only transfers the occupied
clusters, which is like a "free TRIM" in a sense. "dd"
transfers from SSD to SSD would transfer all blocks,
which burns up a lot of the free pool on the destination,
and can benefit from issuing a TRIM per partition
in the Optimize panel later.

I manually create and format the new partitions, and then use rsync to
transfer
the files. That's also how I do my primary backup of data. In run level
1, with
any remaining user processes killed I run ...
time nice -n 19 ionice -n 7 rsync -auvxSHXAP --specials --sparse
--delete --exclude="lost+found" /home/dave/ /aback/home/dave/

Regards, Dave Hodgins


But being sans-automation, your UUIDs or BLKIDs aren't fit for
purpose until you put things back together again. At least
for boot materials, this is the case.

Macrium automates the treatment of Windows and its boot materials.
It gets most of the details right. It's a prototype of
what automation should be, because ordinary users don't
have to drop to command line afterwards.

Macrium can copy EXT4 as well, which is a feature I use. But
sadly, when cloning, it doesn't have the logic to properly
handle /etc/fstab. It doesn't tidy up.

Macrium reaches into the BCD file and edits it, which is
why cloned Windows drives behave themselves. But Macrium
lacks the feature of doing the same for Linux.

I'm still waiting to find even a commercial tool that
does this for the Linux ecosystem properly. The only reason
Macrium has Windows support, is there is at least one
Windows-provided utility that is capable of rebuilding
the BCD. But it doesn't work well enough in practice
to be useful. So the Macrium designers added their
own code to do this. And it isn't always 100%
successful. An attempt to have Win2K added to the
Win7 boot menu, there were some issues with what
it did. Still not perfect, but for a lot of the
users, they might never notice the rough
edges (because who would be running Win2K except
the guy I was helping the other day...).

There are a lot of rocky shoals in the Clone Sea,
and lots of places to run aground. There's still lots
of room for improvements.

Paul