[CentOS] rsyncing directories - sanity check

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 06/24/2015 09:42 AM, Tim Dunphy wrote:
>> And for some reason when the servers were ordered the large
>> local volume ended up being /usr when the ES rpm likes to
>> store it's indexes on /var.
>>
>> So I'm syncing the contents of both directories to a different place,
>> and I'm going swap the large local volume from /usr to /var.
>
> Have you considered just resizing the volumes?  If you're trying to swap
> them with rsync, you're going to have to reboot anyway, and relabel your
> system.  If any daemons are running, you might also corrupt their data
> this way.
>
>> The entire /var partition is only using 549MB:
>>
>> rsync: write failed on "/opt/var/log/lastlog": No space left on device
>> (28)
>
> Depending on what UIDs are allocated to your users, lastlog can be an
> enormous sparse file.  You would need to use rsync's -S flag to copy it.

Um, I've not been following this closely, but /var is 549M? And a separate
partition? I haven't had /var and /usr as separate partitions in almost 10
years. Nor have I had a drive smaller than, um, 160G in about the same.

That being said, why not simply mount the additional partition under var,
for the directory that's running out of space?

      mark