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quick question, though: by piping the standard output of tar in such a way, is it creating unnecessary overhead? i think i remember reading that such a command doesn't actually archive anything
That's pretty much the point. It allows you to make exact copies without having to first store the data in a file archive on your hard drive first. As far as overhead, ehh, I'm not sure that's a problem. It literally took just a few minutes to copy my root partition, and because the computer had to have been brought down in order to put the other drive in it, it can be assumed nothing mission critical was going on.
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would a find command piped to "cp" be another viable option? a better option?
Quite possibly. I'd be interested to know if there are better ways to do this. However, I don't know them.