Copying a large file system (again)

[Tino Schwarze]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 08:00:13AM -0700, RB wrote:

> > Is there a way to transport hardlink information across multiple TAR
> > archives? Or should I rather try to get another GB from somewhere and
> > start over from scratch? Would GNU tar perform better? Shall I try
> > csync2?
> 
> Why not try rsync?  Granted, the calling system's resources will be
> pretty heavily utilized, but all it really requires is SSH on one side
> or the other.  If you're conserving hardlinks, your command would be
> something along the lines of:

I tried that a few months ago - rsync tried to read all the 9 million
files, took over a Gig of memory and then I aborted it because the
machine started swapping.

> rsync -PaH /backup/directory root at remote-host:/destination
> 
> I've never done a sync of your specific size before, you may also want
> to look into the '-W' option if you have very large files.  Failing
> that, if your source is an XFS tree, look at xfsdump.

My source is reiserfs, the new FS will be XFS.

> Interesting ML posts:
> http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2003-August/006853.html
> http://osdir.com/ml/network.rsync.general/2003-12/msg00186.html

Thanks, it looks like I'll need to look for some more memory for the
source machine. Maybe I'll try plugging the SATA RAID into the
destination machine directly (a PE1800 with more RAM) and copy locally,
skipping the network, then maybe rsync will be an option since most of
the files are already in place, just the main pool is still missing.

Thanks,

Tino.

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