On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 18:48 +0800, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:

I was performing some maintenance on our server, and find myself somewhat stumped. I replaced the HD I used as a backup. It had 10 days worth of "daily" backups using storeBackup, and used up ~21GB on the HD. I know it uses hard links and maybe some other 'niceties' to shrink the size of the backups (like bz2). I just wanted to transfer the contents of one to the other. I used rsync -avz /mnt/ /data1 (/mnt was where I mounted the old HD, /data1 is where the backup drive is mounted.). It backed on days worth, which took about 21GB, and I killed it when it was maybe halfway through the second days worth as it had gone to ~25GB. Obviously, I missed something. How could those backups take 21M on the old drive and a lot more on the one I was copying to. Is this making any sense to anyone? I thought rsync would make a "mirror" copy, but obviously not quite. What would copy those storebackup directories so that they would be the same as before, with its use of hard links and all (I'm guessing the hard links might be part of my problem, but I might be way off. I would appreciate any ideas.

Also use -H to preserve the hardlinks, rsync -avzH should work. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998