rsync dies, need another approach

[Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak]

Welty, Richard wrote:
>> Can anyone suggest a way to copy a large directory structure, while 
>> preserving symlinks and keeping memory requirements low?
> 
> try piping the output of a tar to the input of another tar,
> 
> tar cvf - <directory> | tar xvf -
> 
> where you'll need to wrap rsh or ssh around one of the tar commands
> (and an associated cd to the correct directory), and root around in
> the tar man page to get the flags right. i know this will work, i
> just do it infrequently enough that i can't remember exact parameters.


Richard,

Thanks! This did it:

tar vcf - /backups | ssh root at fuscia tar xf - -C /

as described at

http://programming.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/1632257&tid=70&tid=85&tid=43


- Mike