The best software to make exact copies are dd and ghost. Newer tools worth looking into are partimage and clonezilla. There is a liveCD with gparted and clonezilla that I've been looking at lately. You may want to check it out. It is a good idea to make your ghost image or copy with a tool that does so while the on disk OS is inactive, such as with a liveCD or DOS boot image. Brian On 7/21/07, Billy Crook <> wrote:
I read the man pace ahead of time, and noticed that little quirk. i guess i understand why it might copy each link to the inode as a seperate file. It makes me wonder though if there's not a better tool for the job of replicating a filesystem to another disk aside from dd'ing the whole thing.
On 7/21/07, Charles Steinkuehler <> wrote:
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Billy Crook wrote:
That must be exactly it. I remember when I formatted crypt, I did specifiy options. Whereas when I formatted crypt2, I did not. Can't check to make sure though. crypt2 will be in a bank vault for 6 months. Crypt3 is in the works though. Should be ready to play with by next Friday. Im just glad it wasn't a filesystem error.
The other thing that can cause this are hard links, which are *NOT* copied by default when using the -a switch to rsync. You have to specify --hard-links or you wind up with N actual copies of any hardlinked files, instead of one file and N inodes.
- -- Charles Steinkuehler