[ale] duplicating a working system for backup.

[Scott Castaline]

My system is currently running Fedora 32 on a 8 TB hard drive. My 
original backup drive went on a four foot dive to a hard floor. To 
confirm the damage I powered it up and my wife could hear the screeching 
sound it made downstairs. I have since bought a 10 TB HDD and originally 
hooked it up to my PC and booted from DVD and did a dd if=/dev/sda 
of=/dev/sdb. After 5 days it was still running and as in my rush to just 
get started I didn't take time to look up means of monitoring status so 
I thought maybe it was hung even though it looked like it was still 
working under ps -ef.

The original drive is divided up into 3 partitions with part 1 starting 
at sector 2048, I don't remember why, I just remember that it was 
necessary for gpt drives. part 1 is set for 1Meg or 2048 sectors and is 
the BIOS Boot, part 2 is my /boot for Linux @ 1.2G and part 3 is the 
rest of the drive fully encrypted with dmcrypt and this contains the 
rest of the filesystems (/, /home, & /pub) I have several image files of 
CDs and DVDs which is my music and video libraries as well as various 
linux distributions and many PDFs. I assume that the delays were on the 
image files as when I went ahead and pulled the plug and rebooted the 
new drive had some serious file system issues. Once fsck did it's thing 
I wound with about 5 TB of lost files. Then I started having issues 
bouncing back and forth between the 2 hdds due to the UUIDs being the 
same which I had forgotten about.

So I wound up removing the new drive completely and rebooted several 
times (both cold and warm boots) with the original drive and everything 
seemed okay with dev/sda again. I have since reconnected the new drive 
after totally disconnecting the main drive and booting from DVD I did dd 
if=/dev/urando of=/dev/sda (which was the 10TB HDD at that time). So now 
I'm back at square one. I want to backup my whole system onto the 10TB 
HDD and if need be, be able to swap out the drive and pick up from the 
last backup. I normally use rsync for my weekly backups using Flash 
Drives and a HDD. What's the best and quickest way to do this, to have a 
totally bootable working system on my backup HDD?

Thanks for any advice

-- 
Sent to you and NSA, CIA, FBI, SS, DHS and GOD only knows who the hell else...