[Discuss] rsync v. cp in data migration

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> Rich: you said change the rsync command if NTFS filesystems were involved,
> but I don't see any reference in the rsync man page to NTFS execution
> differences or gotchas.

NTFS does not use POSIX permissions. Copying owners and permissions
doesn't work right. You get unusable permissions modes on the target
when the source is NTFS and the target is POSIXish. Simpler not to try
to copy them in the first place.


> Also, you said use "the file system's preferred backup and restore tools"
> so I'll bite:  What are those?  I'm using Ext4 and NFS in my case.  By
> backup/restore, do you mean "use tar".  Or do you have a recommendation
> like rbackup?

One of Linux's most egregious failings is that it doesn't have native
backup tools for most of its file systems. ext2 has a BSD-style dump and
restore but those don't work reliably (maybe not at all) on ext3/4.
Neither tar nor cpio back up or restore non-POSIX metadata like ext2
attributes. That leaves us with nothing that will back up and restore
the complete file system.


> In my case, we're talking about user's home dirs which are full of svn
> working copies, so there are TONS of file duplicates across the volume.  Is
> there a good tool that would apply in this case?  ie. a backup tool that
> de-dupes?

Deduplication is orthogonal to backups.

-- 
Rich P.