That's the least important part about my post. I mentioned several things, one being the shell you probably already have running, that all will do a perfectly fine job - to hopefully demonstrate that.

'cp' is sparse aware. Yay. Is that a good thing, actually? If the source has zeroes, I want to write zeroes. Not sure... probably fine. I've been awake too long.

'ddrescue' is special, but again, consistency is key. I don't really care how it's copied. I just question 'should' - there are advantages elsewhere.

edit: My main gist is this - living off the land applies here, too! Whatever option is available. Make the copy, check the checksums. Pull out the bigger gun if necessary.

Never know when you have to rely on some binary that's surviving only in caches. Stuck with a broken system and no live environment in sight.