NAME

clone — A file tree cloning tool

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

clone is a file tree cloning tool which runs 3 threads - a scheduler (main), a reader, and a writer thread. Reading and writing occurs in parallel. While this is most beneficial for copying data from one physical disk to another, clone is also very well suited for cloning a file tree to any place on the same disk.

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

AUTHOR

IMPORTANT NOTE

Improper use of clone may delete or overwrite data. Take special care with the -d and the -s option. Also always be sure, that the last command line argument designates a path to a file tree which really is under disposition.

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

clone has been carefully developed and tested. Anyway, clone is provided without any expressed or implied warrantee on being 100 % bug free.