On Jan 30, 2008 8:26 AM, William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 17:14 +0100, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote: > > > > Marcelo Roccasalva wrote: > > > On Jan 30, 2008 11:24 AM, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote: > > >> hi all, > > >> > > >> I use rsync to copy/backup ALL my stuff to another disk. > > >> > > > IMHO, rsync is overkill here. I would: > > > > > > mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/backup; mkdir /mnt/backup/month.day.year > > > cd /home;find . | cpio -vdump /mnt/backup/mon.day.year > > > > how about cp -a ? > > How about "find -newer" to just back up things that have been added or > changed? A big space saver. *However*, this leaves things deleted since > the previous backup(s) in the previous archives. A *good* or *bad* > thing? Depends on what you want to achieve. > > Rsync can handle that situation for you, and so is better if you don't > want to keep deleted files around. > > The cpio solution offers a lot, most beneficial here is the ability to > bzip the archive (anticipating it won't be frequently used), saving a > lot of space. > As long as the majority of the files are not plain text - I have had really bad results using bzip2 on text files - specifically, massive file corruption. I have had to go back to pre-bzipped archives to rebuild these files - not a fun task. I'd go with cpio if rsync causes problems. YMMV. mhr