To dd or to rsync, that's the question...

[Dan Thurman]

Which is the preferred "backup" solution?

As it seems, when I use rsync to copy data from disk1 partitionX
over to disk2 partition X, I noticed that if one uses Fedora Selinux,
one has to touch /.autorelabel for that partition.  It seems to work,
except in cases where the UUID is being "hard-wired" especially
with HAL devices and I started noticing it in cases where xorg
devices are sometimes spitting out errors showing UUID devices,
and crashes Nautilus but recovers and it does this almost every time
the system is rebooted into Fedora.

On the other hand, if one decides to use dd instead, does this preserve
the UUID of the devices including that of the disk partition and it
should work perfectly even without the use of /.autorelabel?

I am trying to get data off of disk1 which is failing (via smartd) and
wish to use the correct backup and restore method getting the data
off of disk1 onto disk2 without "integrity loss", whatever that means.

In the case of dd, it falls flat, if there are sector errors and this would
not work, as in my case - so backup programs that do byte copy would
perhaps also fail.  This was the reason I was forced to use rsync in order
to get the data copied over (with errors: I had two files corrupted and
I assumed that a reinstall of the OS would pickup the missing pieces)
so this leads to Vista as follows on this case, however, I experimented
on another system using dd and Vista, it seems to make no difference
at all when trying to 'upgrade' or reinstall the OS on top of the existing
OS.

I noticed that dd was the only solution for XP and it works, on the
other hand it does not work for Vista.  What I did in the Vista case
was to rsync the Vista partition to disk2/Vista partition, bootrec /fixBoot,
set "active" (boot) to the drive2/Vista partition and completely reinstall
Vista (because I could not figure out how to 'update' instead of Install
as the Update was greyed out), and in doing it this way, the Vista/DVD
seemed to recognize the partition as such, but moved the contents to
"windows.old" and proceeded to complete the installation.  Of course,
this means a complete manual reinstall of 3rd party software and user
profile, a royal pain in the a$$.  Interestingly though, it appears that
one does not need to reactivate the license, and I have yet to see it being
asked for.

Any pointers/advice is appreciated!

Kind regards,
Dan