Copying a large file system (again)

[RB]

> 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.

Does your destination machine have sufficient memory?  I'm not
hard-stuck on rsync, but one of the niceties of running rsync over SSH
is that you can do it from either end.  The side that runs the rsync
command is the one where all the resources are allocated; the other
just gets an SSH connection and a lot of disk i/o.

Failing that, GNU TAR may well work better on less RAM.  S-TAR is
nice, but it *might* have a memory leak or something that causes it to
utilize so much memory.  The problem with so many archival programs is
that they really want to keep an in-memory list of all the files
they've processed and/or are going to process.  It's not so much naive
as presumptive, but that rant doesn't help you much.