Recommended way for initial backup before rsync calls

[Matt McCutchen]

On 9/3/07, Sven.Hartrumpf at fernuni-hagen.de
<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)?

If you're copying an entire partition, another option to consider is
copying the partition raw using dd.

> (Using rsync takes too long for this initial copy.)

I would be surprised if another tool were significantly faster than
rsync.  If that is the case, it might be worth trying to understand
why so that rsync can be improved.  Are you using the current CVS
rsync with incremental recursion (which is critical when you're
transferring such a large number of files)?

Matt