On 11/27/06, Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com> wrote: > > If you can be down a few hours, you should be able to boot the > > install CD in rescue mode and > > dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb (being very careful that those > > are the correct devices for the source and target respectively). > > I'd expect that to take about 3 hours to complete, depending on > > your drives and controller. > > That may be what we have to try. This isn't the root filesystem, so > we should just be able to unmount it during the dd and not have to > reboot? Yes, you just have to be sure nothing changes during the copy and unmounting will take care of that. > > Another approach > > would be to put the drive directly in the 2nd server and do the > > rsync over the network. This would probably complete over a weekend. > > The second server is 2900 miles away in another data center with no > dedicated network between the locations, so this probably isn't going > to work ... You could use some other local machine. > > If the files are changing, you can do one run with the machine active, > > then repeat it when no changes are happening. The 2nd run should go > > very quickly since it only has to copy the differences. > > Unfortunately we're talking about a relatively small number of > relatively huge files, so the checksumming is a significant portion of > the rsync time. If you don't use the -i option, rsync will skip over existing files that match in length and timestamps without doing the block checksum compares. Of course if the big files are changing, this won't help much. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com