rsync or dd to clone a hard drive?

[John Aldrich]

On Wed October 6 2010, JB wrote:
> Maxime Alarie <malarie <at> processia.com> writes:
> > I have never used dd to clone a hard disk. 
> > 
> > I use rsync for a lot of   my backups , and I was wondering
> > what would be the best tool to clone a  disk.  I don’t want 3rd
> > party software also.  I want built in command  line tools.
> > 
> > I know rsync will resync where it left off if I encounter a
> > problem, what about dd?  Do I  absolutely have to creat an image
> > before cloning?
> > Ex: dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.img   or I can use dd if=/dev/sda
> > of=/dev/sdb?
> > 
Neither. ;-) Use G4L or similar. It's free, it's bootable and it does 
network ->Disk, Disk->Disk or Disk ->Network. :-)