How to copy a Fedora-4 system? Again!

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Apr 10 17:16:14 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 06:45, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> > OK, but why should it hurt anything to have the destination
> > file system have a copy of the running source system?  Shouldn't
> > anything necessary be reconstructed and anything else not
> > matter?  If you can't restore a working system from a tar
> > backup a lot of people have a big problem.
> 
> That's a very good question - in fact, more or less the same question.
> You will have to exclude some directories, eg /proc, if you do this;
> so the same question arises, which do you exclude?
> 
> Actually, I didn't try tar on this occasion.
> I used rsync simply because it is easier to exclude directories with this,
> although I know it is possible with tar also.
> Well, there was another reason for using rsync;
> I thought some problem might arise during the copy,
> and rsync would allow me to resume.

> But is there actually any difference between rsync and tar
> for this purpose?

As long as you use the -a option with rsync it should do
the same as tar - and you need -H for hardlinks and -S
for sparse file handling, but omitting them shouldn't be
fatal.  Normally with either one I would use the
--one-file-system option and repeat for each mounted
file system I wanted (which may or may not be separate on
the target copy).  That automatically skips /proc and
any odd CD or nfs mounts that might be active.  But, I
haven't done it with udev based systems.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com





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