A difficult filesystem

[Andy Armstrong]

I have an rsync based backup regime that results in a filesystem  
containing lots of inodes many of which have as many as fifty hard  
links pointing to them. I'm not sure how many files there are in  
total - the little script I have analysing it has been running all  
night and is up to 26,000,000 plus. debugfs tells me there are a  
shade over 6,000,000 inodes.

I want to migrate the whole (ext3) filesystem onto another, larger  
device.

Any of the normal hard-link-preserving copying methods run out of  
memory pretty early - for obvious reasons.

So I copied the whole filesystem (dd if=x of=y) onto the new device  
with a view to growing it in place. Unfortunately parted deosn't like  
it either - "You found a bug in GNU Parted".

While I work up a bug report for parted I've got a little Perl prog  
crawling the whole filesystem and building a SQLite DB with two  
tables - one for dir entries and one for inodes. When the finishes  
(sometime next week at the current rate of progress) I'll have a 30G  
or so database with more than 100 million rows.

Then I should be in a position to copy the FS preserving hard links.  
Phew.

While I'm waiting does anyone have tips for other tools that might be  
useful?

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net