[GLLUG] Suggestions on hardware migration?

[Charles Ulrich]

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 16:18, STeve Andre' wrote:
> I'll have to look at the discussion of cp and tar for copying; I've
> stayed with the tar method when cp just pain died when copying
> hundreds of gigs of data in thousands of directories.  But obviously
> there are tens of ways to do anything.

The main problem with cp is that it works at the file level and isn't 
always very intelligent when it comes to copying entire filesystems. 
I've always run into little surprises when using it for this purpose.

I didn't see anyone mention dump/restore yet... if your filesystem 
supports it (i.e., not resiserfs), you're guaranteed to get an 
identical copy of the filesystem as they work on the filesystem level 
rather than at the individual file level like cp. (In combination, dump 
and restore are essentially the Unix version of Norton Ghost, only much 
older.) There are docs and scripts scattered across the web that can 
show you how to clone a disk with dump/restore. They even work well 
with USB- and firewire-attached disks.

If you can't get dump/restore to work, then you may even try rsync. It's 
specifically designed for mirroring data so it tends to handle most 
everything properly so long as you feed it the right flags. 

Charles
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