Swapping Drives...

[Steven Elling]

On Monday 21 July 2003 18:48, Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
> I've also done this with tar, which I know preserves hardlinks in the
> filesystem.  I don't think the cp command does this, and I'm off-hand
> not sure about rsync.  The easy way to tell if hardlinks are not being
> preserved is the size required by /usr grows dramatically when all the
> localization hardlinks turn into physically seperate files (each taking
> up space on the drive) after a copy.

Charles did bring up a good point about using tar to preserve hardlinks.  I 
don't mirror drives that often so I usually don't remember.

Your best option would be to use tar or dump to copy the "file system" from 
one drive to the other.  The reason being they preserve hardlinks and inode 
numbers, which in some cases is important.  dump only works on ext2/3 
filesystem so if you are using reiserfs, xfs, etc. then tar is your only 
option.