A difficult filesystem

[Peter Hickman]

Andy Armstrong wrote:
> 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?
>
Is mtree available for your system? This can recreate directory 
structures and reset permissions and ownerships - it's a *BSD thing but 
should be available.

-- 
Peter Hickman.

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