<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>It would be very nice to be able to rsync the raw
data content of, e.g., a non-mounted disk partition, particularly in
combination with --inplace.</div><div><br></div><div>Our reality:
several dual-boot machines running Windows during the day and Linux at
night, during backups. Windows is very tedious and iffy to re-reinstall
without a raw disk image to start from. Disks fail, and the ensuing
downtime must be minimized. <br></div><div><br></div><div>We're using
dd for this. Most of the nightly work is redundant and wasteful of
elapsed time and storage. Storage is cheap, but it's not *that* cheap.
Elapsed time is priceless.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Rsync refuses
to back up raw devices, and even raw character devices, with the message
"skipping non-regular file" (I think the relevant message is in
generator.c). <br></div><div><br></div><div>In Linux, anyway, the "raw"
command allows a block device to be bound as
a character device, and then even a "cat" command can read the raw data
of the block device. So why does rsync refuse to copy such content, or
why is it a bad idea, or what rsync doctrine conflicts with it? I
agree there are security concerns here, but rsync already disallows some
of its functions unless the super user is requesting them. <div class="gmail-adL"><br></div></div></div></div>