NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Cloning includes the whole directory hierarchy, i.e. sub-directories, files, hard links, symbolic links, attributes (modes, flags, times), extended attributes and access control lists.

clone is useful for cloning (thus backing-up) live file systems, and it can also be used in incremental and synchronization mode.

clone works on FreeBSD and macOS.

clone is very fast, for example, cloning a whole UFS2 file hierarchy on FreeBSD 9.1 of in total 2.3 TBytes of data from one hard disk to another took 7.5 h, so the average transfer rate for all kind of files (very small up to very big ones) was about 89 MByte/s.

Optional flags:

-c roff | woff | rwoff

Selectively turn off the file system cache for reading or writing or for reading and writing -- the caches are on by default.

The options -d, -i, -s are mutually exclusive:

 

-d

Delete the contents of the destination before cloning, but do not remove the destination directory or mount point itself. Stop on error. Deletion requires user confirmation, unless it is confirmed inherently by the -y flag. Be careful, deletion cannot be undone! NOTE: It may take its time to empty hugh file trees, and it may be faster to use newfs(8) for initializing big volumes.

-i

Incrementally add new content to or change content in the destination, but do not touch content in destination that does not exist in source.

-s

Completely synchronize destination with source.

-l

Don't copy, but create hard links of regular files in the cloned directory tree.

-v

Verbosity level (default = 1):
0 - no output
1 - show directory action: + for add, - for delete, = for keep
2 - indicate cloned files by '.'
3 - display the path names of cloned file system items

-x exclude-list

Colon separated list of entity names or full path names to be excluded from cloning. Use full path names to single out exactly one item. Use entity names for all existing entities having that name being excluded.
For example: -x ".snap:/.sujournal:.DS_Store:/fullpath/to a/volatile cache"

-X excl-list-file

File containing a list of entity names or full path names to be excluded -- one item per line.

-y

Automatically answer with y(es) to y|n confirmation prompts.

-h | -? | ?

Show the usage instructions.

Required arguments:

source/

Path to the source directory or mount point to be cloned. The final '/' may be omitted.

destination/

Path to the destination directory or mount point. If the destination does not exist, then it will be created. The final '/' may be omitted.

EXAMPLES

Initial cloning of the root volume / to a volume mounted on /mnt:

clone / /mnt

Same as above, but empty /mnt before cloning:

clone -d / /mnt

Incrementally update the clone with respect to the master:

clone -i / /mnt

Keep the clone exactly synchronized to the master:

clone -s / /mnt

Create a non-versioned clone of a versioned source tree:

clone -x .svn /path/to/my/project /path/to/non-versioned/project

Clone a directory to a share and strip file system specific meta data:

clone -x ".DS_Store:.AppleDouble:.AppleDesktop:.appdisk" /path/to/afpvol /path/to/the/share

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

IMPORTANT NOTE

In NO event shall the author and/or copyright owner be liable for ANY damages resulting from ANY use of this software. Use clone at your own risk!

BUGS