Need copy tool for heavily hardlinked disk

[Kevin Wang]

Also you can use dump|restore. don't bother to write it out anywhere,
just dump to stdout and restore from stdin.  restore is filesystem
independent.

   - Kevin

On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 11:51:12 -0700, Kevin Wang <rightsock at gmail.com> wrote:
> cpio handles hard links, but imho rsync is still probably your best
> bet, since it's designed to run incrementally.
> 
> Otherwise, it's time to write your own tool.  For reference, how many
> inodes? (df -i)  You may be running out of memory.
> 
>    - Kevin
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 11:47:02 -0700, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> >
> > I need a fast hard disk copy tool, and am looking for suggestions.
> >
> > I have a hard drive partition with 170GB of data in it.  I want to copy
> > the data into a partition (made with more inodes) on another drive.
> >
> > Of course, since I am changing the file system on the target, I
> > cannot do a simple dd for an exact copy of the partition.
> >
> > A file-by-file copy would still be easy, except(!) that the data
> > has an enormous number of hard links in it,  120 to 150 hard links
> > per file.  This slows down the copy by a corresponding factor with
> > the common tools.  For example, for a 126MB directory, using the
> > usual copy procedures, with 120 hard links, the run times are:
> >
> >                real       system
> > cp -a:         17m 22s        25s
> > piped tar:     18m 10s        26s
> > rsync -a:      37m 30s     2m 40s
> >
> > Extrapolating to 170GB, that is 400 hours for the cp -a , or more
> > than two weeks (!).  I have been running a "cp -a" for 4 days now,
> > and am about 40% done, so the estimate is not too far off.  As far
> > as the standard tools can detect, I am moving more than 20 terabytes,
> > so without a smart tool that understands hard links this will take
> > a very long time.
> >
> > So, does anyone have an exotic disk copy tool that can do this more
> > efficiently?  I would like to use the target disk soon, before
> > september at least!
> >
> > Keith
> >
> > --
> > Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
> > KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
> > Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
> >
> > --
> > fedora-list mailing list
> > fedora-list at redhat.com
> > To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
> >
>