My 6 year old drive finally packed in yesterday.  I've coaxed it to read my old /home partition - which is all I really want to rescue.  I've got a backup which is 3 months old that contains almost everything I need but for peace of mind I'd really like to copy off what I can before I ditch the drive.

I've found before when doing big copies of multi-gig partitions that it can be quite a challenge to get a good copy.

'cp -r' seems to take up far more space on the target device than was on the original device

'tar -cvzf' always exits after delayed errors

and I'm not quite sure if 'dd' actually creates a useable copy.

So fellow husites, please help me. What is the most reliable way to copy a 202G partition?