mjhjmtu

I need to backup / copy the files of my Linux installation to an external drive, so that I can restore them onto the new, larger disk.

The destination disk for the restoration is twice as large, and will have larger partitions, ext4 and linux-swap. Imaging the entire disk or its first partition is not really a good option, because both require later re-partitioning I'd like to avoid.

I am backing up to an exFAT-formatted drive, there are some issues with copying an ext4 Linux installation to exFAT though

• may destroy important hard links and fast* symbolic links from the ext4 file system (will break Linux)




• won't preserve file ownership / permissions and setuid bits (will break Linux)




• won't preserve capabilities (will break Linux)




• won't preserve files extended attributes (xattrs) as well, as I believe many files have important information there (I don't care about Unix ACLs as I don't think I have any files using them)

If I copied the files directly to NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, etc, much of this metadata would be destroyed.

I don't care about compression since the original disk is smaller than my backup drive, but (GNU) tar seems to preserve only permissions/ownership (with -p and extract with --same-owner), links and xattrs, but file capability support is needed to backup modern Linux.

It seems the other main options are a CloneZilla Live system, and cpio which seems to create tar archives.

So the main options are

1. CloneZilla or just imaging the parition


2. 
   tar itself, which may break things


3. 
   cpio, which may be limited by the tar archive format?

*80,000 of the 83,000 symlinks are fast symlinks, and I'd like to preserve their fast-ness if possible

If you really want to use a general purpose storage device without reformatting it, AND it has largefile support (not FAT, but maybe exFAT, NTFS, UDF...), the simplest way to make sure it works is to use a disk image file on it.

1. Create a disk image file of the same size as the source filesystem.


2. Copy your files in to it.


3. Boot the target system with the install environment of your choice, connect the external disk.


4. Copy the files from the disk image on to the target system.


5. (Do whatever magic is required to make it bootable, given your target hardware).

Steps 1/2 will actually be faster if you can use a partition imager like e2image -a. This requires that the source filesystem not be mounted. I don't know what the status of e2image -a is. Unfortunately partclone (from Clonezilla) does not create mountable raw disk image files, or at least not by default.