On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 03:16:46PM +0000, James wrote: > > rsync is too high-level, and may not do exactly the right thing with > > links or sparse files or who knows what. > > rsync -cav takes cares of symlinks and all that just right. It's a > beautiful thing. > > Checksumming, too. Ah, bliss.
It doesn't necessarily do the right thing with flags, acls and other extended attributes, > > dd is too low-level--you get > > the same partition table/bsdlabel and the exact same slice/partition > > sizes. That's okay on an identical hard drive, but a pain on one that's > > larger. > > dump, on the other hand, is just right. > If the file names on the drive change during the dump, corruption can > occur. At least on linux. I remember Torvalds ranting about it on a > mailing list. I imagine FreeBSD suffers the same issue, though, as it's > a pretty generic problem. For starters, you should _never_ dump a live filesystem. What you can do is dump a snapshot of a live filesystem, using dumps '-L' option, because a snapshot is like a frozen image of the filesystem; it doesn't change. Dump & restore is the best way to move data and all attributes to a larger disk. See ยง9.2 of the FAQ. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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