rsync dies, need another approach

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 09:00, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
> I'm trying to copy a large filesystem (around 10M inodes) from on FC4 
> computer to another. I need to preserve the symlinks, to minimize 
> storage requirements.
> 
> The obvious choice is to use rsync -a, but it dies on me (out of memory 
> I think - I have 256 MB on the source computer, and rsync uses 100 bytes 
> / file, so 100b x 10M = 1G). Plan B is to actually move the hard drive 
> from one computer to the other, and then use cp -al, but I'd rather not 
> do that, because the computers aren't easily accessible.
> 
> Can anyone suggest a way to copy a large directory structure, while 
> preserving symlinks and keeping memory requirements low?

NFS mount one drive into the other machine (mounting the source into
the target would probably be best) and use 'cp -a'.  Or pipe tar
output through ssh:

tar -cf - . | ssh remote '(cd path && tar -xpf -)'

--
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com