General Linux question

[odmetroit0]

Hi ,
I am beginner in Linux and do not know much about it.
regarding my last post that I haven't received any answer ( https://www.linux.org/threads/disk-cloning-s-m-a-r-t-output.54040/)
Please answer following questions :

The final step now was to copy the recovered files out of that image file (sdb1.img) created above. For this I mounted the image file into a directory using the loop device e.g.:

sudo mount -o loop sdb1.img /mnt

Then I used rsync command to copy all the files to the new disk (after setting up this new disk like creating a partition and formatting it with a file system). Lets assume that the new disk is mounted at /data the command to copy the files looks like this (besides other things --archive keeps all the permissions e.g.):

sudo rsync --archive --verbose --progress /mnt/ /data/

1---In which case loop is used and explain the command in simple words .
2--- What is the usability of the second command, rsync?


Here are two quotes from other people's comments:

Note: Disk cloning between drives with different logical sector sizes is not advised.
Moving to a drive with a smaller logical sector size (e.g. from 4096 bytes to 512 bytes) will require recreating the partition table since partition boundaries are specified in sector numbers.
Moving to a drive with a larger logical sector size (e.g. from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes) may not be possible at all if a file system's block size is less than target drive's logical sector size or is not divisible by it.

Generally it is not advised to directly clone a failing HDD to another one.Different hard drives may have different sector sizes ( 512 native, 512e, 4096 native etc ) which may cause issues. It is always better to take an image of the source disk - sector size of target disk won't matter. Almost all data recovery tools available today supports directly working with disk images ( including TestDisk, Photorec , Getdataback , R-Studio etc ).

3----Do you agree with these statements ? Does it seem logical ?

4---If I connect a faulty hard drive while running Linux Mint, will the operating system automatically write anything to the external hard drive? If so, how can I unmount any automatically written data? I have seen several instructions indicating that to clone a faulty hard drive, both the faulty and healthy drives should be mounted. My straightforward question is: will connecting both drives cause any issues, such as writing data to the faulty drive automatically? (I apologize if this seems like a crazy question.)