[PLUG] Moving/copying old home to new machine

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Mon Sep 11 21:05:53 UTC 2017


>>>>> "Neal" == Neal  <nsedell at gmail.com> writes:

Neal> Personally, I'm a fan of using tar over ssh for initial copies,
Neal> because tar handles hard and soft links gracefully and quickly:

Neal> [...]

Neal> I had tried rsync a few years ago. Even though I've Unixed and
Neal> Sunosed and Solarised and Linuxed for decades, as a hobby if not
Neal> at work, I couldn't grock rsync. Something about needing a
Neal> service, that I did have running, which is probably a faulty
Neal> memory... Yeah, lame, wasn't an actual need, was just curious,
Neal> your mileage hopefully varies.

Rsync can use normal ssh to provide all the service it needs for
over-the-network transfers.  I typically use the -v -a -H options to
preserve hardlinks.  Note that in order to preserve hardlinks, it needs
to keep track of the inodes it has seen before, and on VERY LARGE file
sets, this can chew up significant amounts of RAM.  The other thing to
be aware of is that trailing /'s on paths are significant.

These days, my fingers or my command history remembers everything.  If
you have specific questions or don't trust me, there is the man page. ;-)

We had Andrew Tridgell at an advanced topics talk (not a speaker, just
wandered in while in Portland for a visit) a long time ago.  Eric
Harrison will remember.  He deserves a Nobel Prize for rsync.  And, he
is indirectly responsible for git as well.  I'm not even going to
mention Samba.  So, yay him!


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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