How to Backup or Clone Linux Partitions Using ‘cat’ Command

A rough utilization of Linux cat command would be to make a full disk backup or a disk partition backup or cloning of a disk partition by redirecting the command output against the partition of a hard disk, or USB stick or a local image file or write the output to a network socket.

Linux Filesystem Backup Using ‘cat’ Command

It absolutely normal of you to think of why we should use cat over dd when the latter does the same job easily, which is quite right, however, I recently realized that cat is much faster than dd when its comes to speed and performance.

I do agree that dd provides, even more, options and also very useful in dealing with large backups such as tape drives, whereas cat includes lesser option and it’s not necessarily a worthy dd replacement but still, remains an option wherever applicable.

Suggested Read: How to Clone or Backup Linux Disk Using Clonezilla

Trust me, it gets the job done quite successfully in copying the content of a partition to a new unformatted partition. The only requirements would be to provide a valid hard disk partition with the minimum size of the existing data and with no filesystem whatsoever.

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