Using rsync to syncronize two unmounted disk partitions

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 09:34:43AM +0100, Antonio Arauzo Azofra wrote:
> Would it be possible to syncronize two partitions at device level
> somehow?

I wonder if someone has written a simple filesystem driver which mounts
the raw data of a device as though it were a single, big file?  Such a
solution would allow the use of any normal filesystem tool (including
rsync) on block-device data.

>    # rsync /dev/hda8 /dev/hda9

Using rsync to update the data for two local block devices wouldn't be
very useful because the incremental-update algorithm would tend to slow
down the transfer instead of speed it up (the only exception for a local
transfer is when the write speed for a device is much slower than the
read speed, and enough of the data matches that the saved write time
more than makes up for the extra read time).

..wayne..