On Thursday 06 March 2008 11:28:31 am Keith Lofstrom wrote: <snip> > "Almost nothing", unfortunately, can be a big difference. When I was > testing, tar did not produce bootable images, because some of the special > files did not copy. Perhaps it has been improved. rsync does produce > bootable images (if it did not, then dirvish wouldn't be very useful). > > My point is that these file copy tools can take a surprisingly long > time. My 500GB backup drive is now about 70% full, with about 100 > images on it (I do not expire them), meaning that to some tools, on > the file level, the drive appears to contain around 60 terabytes. > A drive copy at the file level will attempt to traverse a large > fraction of that 60TB; if the interface is running at 20MB/sec > that will take a large fraction of 800 hours. Yikes! > <snip>
Actually, tar can create bootable images. Gentoo stage3 images does that very thing. All you need to do after untaring the stage 3 file is compile a kernel and grub/lilo, and off you go. Is it the happiest of boots? No, not really. It does work, however. I've also used netcat and tar to copy a build on an old machine from a new one that compiled the packages with Gentoo. After that, I setup grub, and booted away. _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
