William L. Maltby wrote:
On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 16:04 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
William L. Maltby wrote:
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Am I missing something? Just old fashioned? Cpio has all the params you want and can be _very_ fast with the righ parameters. Similar to the above dump/restore set I've seen many use tar/untar equivalents.
Or, on everything that has gnu cp (which would be at least every linux distro), 'cp -a . /mnt' should work. However, I usually use rsync since you can stop and restart keeping the completed work or repeat to get updates, and it works the same over ssh if the drive in question is on a different machine.
Yep. I've recently began using rsync for several types of "local" copy, usually back-up related. I can't recall if the "cp -a" detects and handles hard-links to minimize space requirements though. I know cpio can/does. I guess I'll have to read up on cp some more and see if it leaves the access times alone (cpio parameter allows retaining that) and handles hard-links efficiently.
Rsync -a covers most options except hardlinks - you need to add -H for that because it adds significant overhead to track them.