package of current rsync (today) has bug ?

DirtyAngel

Hi ...

I downloaded and installed rsync today ...

After I wanted to clone harddisk to second harddisk
rsync made first harddisk in-usable ... !?

I used command :

sudo rsync -avr /dev/sda /dev/sdb

I hope this is correct direction from source A to clone B ?

However now both disks are in-usable ?

First harddisk was encrypted LVM.
But this was earlier time No problem ?

DirtyAngel

Hmmm ...
I assume why this happened with
so-called "bug".

Partition table of harddisk A was ms-dos
and partition table of clone B was GPT.

brent

I did research this and some of it confirmed what I suspected: there are far better apps than Grsync to clone drives.
Also in my reading (https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=291810) I see discussions of more precise parameters for Grsync than you have mentioned that need to be set including symlinks, specific boot info etc. The convo in that link is 2019 but interesting.
Hope this helps.
***unless you have successfully cloned drives before in grsync, then disregard entire reply

ReillyBrogan

What exactly are you trying to do here? Just clone all of the partitions over to the new drive? I've never seen anyone use rsync for that, DD is the tool that is most commonly used because it supports block-level copying. I've only ever seen rsync used to clone filesystems, IE mount both partitions first and then rsync between them.

DirtyAngel

ReillyBrogan In Linux-Community was said, that command rsync works better than command dd, but that was longer ago. Some said that rsync works better, when used recursively for backup.

[deleted]

rsync avoids copying block devices by default, but one can override that with --copy-devices flag. With the flags you specified in the OP rsync should just ignore /dev/sda, so your data corruption is because of something else than rsync.

DirtyAngel

[deleted] The question is ... too ... : This depends on distro, how to use commands when two drives are involved ... which direction ? : source to target or target to source ?