A difficult filesystem

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 01:30:05PM +0100, 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.

Ahh, rsync and hard links, the choice of the discerning gentleman-
sysadmin.  Hurrah!

> 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.

rsync -H is a notorious memory-hog.  However, if you're brave enough to
upgrade to rsync 3, then rsync eats far less memory.  No idea if that
still holds for -H, but it's worth trying.  What else did you try?

The obvious choice is dump/restore if the two FSes are the same type.

-- 
David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive

I hate baby seals.  They get asked to all the best clubs.