Disk Clone With Linux dd Command
--------------------------------
Recently I decided to do a disk clone from one of my homelab servers that was
running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS so I could install Gentoo on it.This guide shows the
steps I took to get my disk cloned.

Get the disk information
------------------------
Before I could start the clonning process;I had to get disk block information
using `lsblk`.

```
$ lsblk
NAME               MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sr0                 11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
xvda               202:0    0   30G  0 disk
├─xvda1            202:1    0  487M  0 part /boot
├─xvda2            202:2    0    1K  0 part
└─xvda5            202:5    0 29.5G  0 part
  ├─owl--vg-root   252:0    0 27.4G  0 lvm  /
  └─owl--vg-swap_1 252:1    0  2.1G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
```
My disk of interest was `xvda` that has lvm partions.

Clonning the disk
-----------------
The cloned disk needed to be stored to another server so I had to pipe the
result of the `dd` command to `ssh`.

```bash
$ dd if=/dev/xvda | ssh xvf@storage.local "sudo dd of=~/clone.img status=progress"
```

The above command clone the disk `/dev/xvda` to `clone.img` on my other server.
Once the process had finished I loaded the image with `kvm` to test if
everything is ok.The process was successfully since I managed to boot the image
with no error.

I prefer working with `qcow2` format instead of the `raw` so I had to do an
image convertion using `qemu-img`.

```bash
$ qemu-img -f raw -O qcow2 clone.img clone.qcow2
```

And that's it.