On 7/11/12, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Hours? This should happen in the time it takes to transfer a directory listing and read through it unless you used --ignore-times in the arguments. If you have many millions of files or not enough RAM to hold the list I suppose it could take hours.
Not that many files definitely, more in the range of tens of thousands. But definitely more than an hour or two with small bursts of network traffic.
Rear 'might' be quick and easy. It is intended to be almost unattended and do everything for you. As for extra software - it is a 'yum install' from EPEL. The down side is that if it doesn't work, it isn't very well documented to help figure out how to fix it. I'd still recommend looking at it as a backup/restore solution with an option to clone. With a minimum amount of fiddling you can get it to generate a boot iso image that will re-create the source filesystem layout and bring up the network. Then, if you didn't want to let it handle the backup/restore part you could manually rsync to it from the live system.
I'll look into it when I need to do this again. It just isn't something I expect to do with any regularity and unfortunately server admin isn't what directly goes into my salary so it has to take a second priority.