strange strange problem! (please help!!)

[Chris Rouch]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 10:33:05 -0800 (PST)
Globe Trotter <itsme_410 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> 
> Now comes the twist. I have been trying to secure copy all the files
> in my office machine (my home directory) to the /usr/local on the
> laptop. There are about 21GB worth of files. At start, /usr/local on
> the laptop has less than 1 GB worth of files. However, I run out of
> space and it still does not get done. I must note that du on the
> directory /usr/local/me on the office Dell Precision 650 indicates
> that the size is 
> 
> /usr/local> du -sm me
> 21413   me
> 
> However, the laptop is getting swamped, and running out of disk
> space. I can understand some amount of discrepancy, but so far off
> that a 21GB directory is not fitting in close to 40GB HDD????

How are you doing the copy? If you have hard links on your desktop they
will take up (almost) no space, but copying them will copy the entire
file and thus take a lot more space. rsync -vaH will take care of this
correctly. rsync(1) for the gory details.

Regards,

Chris