Hi Arun, I did a tar to move a partition to a newly formatted HD partition. When I do a df of the filesystems, the amount of space used is NOT equal. Therefore the copies are NOT identical at some level as far as the file system is concerned. I made sure to copy sym links as links and not resolve them. Babu --- Arun Khan wrote:

--- babu walad wrote:

...

cp, cpio, etc... In addition there are utilities to do the same thing. The question is, which method is best at preserving the copy as closely as the original?

What do you mean by "as closely as the original?"

All the tools you mentioned will copy the "contents" of the files equally well.

If you want to preserve the time stamp, symlinks etc. then look up the man page of the specific tool. If you simply want to back up the files, while you run your diagnostics on the HDD, then tar the filesystem to a different HDD and extract them using the time stamp and other relevant options.

-- Arun Khan

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-----Original Message----- From: Carlos E. R. [mailto:robin1.listas@tiscali.es] Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 11:41 AM To: suse list Subject: Re: [SLE] best way to mirror partitions

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The Friday 2005-09-16 at 10:50 -0700, babu walad wrote:

...

I did a tar to move a partition to a newly formatted HD partition. When I do a df of the filesystems, the amount of space used is NOT equal. Therefore the copies are NOT identical at some level as far as the file system is concerned. I made sure to copy sym links as links and not resolve them.

Read this:

/usr/share/doc/howto/en/txt/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.gz /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/modify.html

Hard Disk Upgrade Mini How-To

v2.11, 13 April 2000

How to copy a Linux system from one disk to another.

...

7. Copy the files from the old disk to the new disk

... Previous versions of the Mini How-To stated that you could also use tar to copy the disk, but this method was found to have a bug. There are of course many other ways to copy the disks, but these three are the simplest, quickest, and most reliable.

So... I don't know why everybody recomends using tar for that task, if it is known to be a buggy method...

(what the bug is, I have no idea; ask the howto writer).

This is from over 5 years ago. I am sure this has been corrected. There can be many reasons the sizes are different. Different block size, different file system, etc. If the partitions are on the same drive or on a drive in the system the best way would be to just do a cp -av of the files. If they are not tar will work just fine. I use it for all my backups. Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com

On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 10:50 -0700, babu walad wrote:

I did a tar to move a partition to a newly formatted HD partition. When I do a df of the filesystems, the amount of space used is NOT equal. Therefore the copies are NOT identical at some level as far as the file system is concerned. I made sure to copy sym links as links and not resolve them.

I have been using tar to backup entire file systems (including restore of / and C: of Windows) and have not encountered any problems yet. Another member has already responded as to why df reports different sizes. If you are not convinced that the file contents are the same then do a "cmp" or "md5sum" on the original and copied files. -- Arun Khan (knura at yahoo dot com) God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.