Copying one's home directory to an external hard disk

[Les Mikesell]

Robin Laing wrote:
>>
>>> What is the best way of copying *entirely* one's home directory to an
>>> external hard disk? 
>>
>> tar
> 
> I will vote against tar.
> 
> I used it for a backup some time ago and just this past weekend, I had 
> to recover 4 files.  Due to the size of the tar file, it took ages.  I 
> am talking hours.
> 
> With the cost of drives today, I would just use cp -a.  I have not used 
> rsync so I cannot comment on that.

There would be almost no difference on the first run except that you can 
interrupt and restart without repeating what had been completed.  On a 
subsequent update, only the changes are copied so it can be hundreds of 
times faster.   Plus, if you add -essh (the default for recent versions) 
and a host: on the source or destination, the syntax is the same for 
remote copies that are just as efficient.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com