Recommended way for initial backup before rsync calls

[Andre Majorel]

On 2007-09-03 16:34 +0200, Sven.Hartrumpf at FernUni-Hagen.de wrote:

> What can you recommend to create the initial backup of a
> partition before calling rsync
> (under Linux, 100 GB, 10M files, only normal files and
> some soft links)?
> 
> (Using rsync takes too long for this initial copy.)
> 
> Here are some candidates:
> 
> 1. star -copy -no-fsync -p -xdot -C $1 . $2
> 
> 2. tar -C $1 -cf - . | tar -C $2 -xf -
> 
> 3. cp -a $1 $2
> 
> 4. cpio ...

cp, cpio and tar all work for me, assuming no hard links, no ACL
and no EA. Didn't try star.

Beware of cps that don't know what to do with device files. That
was long ago on a rescue floppy (Tom's Root Boot, IIRC) but maybe
still something to watch out for.

-- 
André Majorel <URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/>
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