-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Wednesday 2005-08-31 at 10:10 +0200, Albert wrote:
I am using SuSE 9.2 and SuSE 9.3. The partition in question is ReiserFS.
We have an image set on disk that we wish to backup. Each image is about 20 Kb and I think there are more than a million files in the directory.
By "image" I assume you mean "graphic file", not a "partition image". I think Arun understood the second. While using dd for a backup method should work, you will have the same problems to read again the backup as you have with the original.
I cannot get a directory listing - the shell falls over when running ls (I'm logged out after about 20 minutes of hard disk activity and nothing coming to the screen).
It is interesting to note that while filesystems like reiserfs can handle a very large number of files in a single directory, tools like "ls" can't, they bump into a listing size limit somewhere. I think somebody said it was a command line limit of 32 Kb, I don't know. It will be in the list archive. I'd like to know if there are tools that can manage such directories easily.
I need to use Midnight Commander to copy the files - everything else falls over. After copying for 2 days, I had a power failure and stopped the process as the UPS was running out of power. At that point the machine was so slow it took 30 seconds to serve a page through Apache that normally took less than 1 second.
I would stick to mc, as it doesn't crash. However, I would try to subdivide the directory in several other directories; knowing if there is a pattern for the file names wouls help. For example, you could move all files starting with "A" to "directory/A", etc. That way size would be divided by 28. Or you can go one step further: AA, AB, AC, ...,. ZZ. This method is used, for example, by postfix to subdivide its queues in /var/spool/postfix. A script might do it. You can try first if "ls AA*" (or an appropiate pattern) works, or do it manually using mc pattern matching and tagging. Notice that if you _move_ files from the directory, handling the rest should become easier.
Can anyone suggest a way of copying this image set to another hard disk or DVD that will not take forever to do? If possible with a progress bar - indicating how much files there are and how much files still need to be copied.
I could easily regenerate the images (it took 8 days to do it) if there were a better way to save these files on disk to make it easier to manage.
Divide and conquer ;-) - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD4DBQFDFaSjtTMYHG2NR9URAshBAKCFR2AZEBAFuo8R9AzqV0BsbaGVKwCXbUd1 VI6LDEaP13YXmz0SQUWeSw== =yC2n -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----