I need a fast hard disk copy tool, and am looking for suggestions.
I have a hard drive partition with 170GB of data in it. I want to copy
the data into a partition (made with more inodes) on another drive.
Of course, since I am changing the file system on the target, I
cannot do a simple dd for an exact copy of the partition.
A file-by-file copy would still be easy, except(!) that the data
has an enormous number of hard links in it, 120 to 150 hard links
per file. This slows down the copy by a corresponding factor with
the common tools. For example, for a 126MB directory, using the
usual copy procedures, with 120 hard links, the run times are:
real system
cp -a: 17m 22s 25s
piped tar: 18m 10s 26s
rsync -a: 37m 30s 2m 40s
Extrapolating to 170GB, that is 400 hours for the cp -a , or more
than two weeks (!). I have been running a "cp -a" for 4 days now,
and am about 40% done, so the estimate is not too far off. As far
as the standard tools can detect, I am moving more than 20 terabytes,
so without a smart tool that understands hard links this will take
a very long time.
So, does anyone have an exotic disk copy tool that can do this more
efficiently? I would like to use the target disk soon, before
september at least!
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl@xxxxxxxx Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
