Thanks, doing a tar jcvf right now.... I will be looking into using rsync -- sparse files may be a problem, of course! Thanks and best wishes! --- James Wilkinson <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > David Hoffman wrote: > > I'm honestly not sure how you would find out. I am guessing about this > > theory, but here's what I'm thinking. Your original filespace... > > "/usr/local/me" could theoretically contain a symlink. Let's say for > > example, there is a symlink called "data" that points to some space on > > a different filesystem. > > > > Then when you run your du -sm on /usr/local/me, it might not tell you > > the REAL space used if you were to copy, but instead only count > > several bytes for the symlink. > > For completeness, the other option is sparse files. > > When Unix (or a compatible system like Fedora) is asked to create a file > which has huge amounts of (binary) zero in it, it can be set to just > record the fact that most of the file is zero, and store those blocks > which aren't all zero. This is a sparse file. > > This is under application control: it has to write the file the right > way. > > For example, > > [james@howells scratch]$ du -k sparse > 488 sparse > [james@howells scratch]$ ls -lk sparse > -rw-rw-r-- 1 james james 500000 Jan 22 20:08 sparse > > a file that takes 488K on disk, but is actually 500MB (ish) large. > > When you copy a sparse file with some utilities, they will write out a > non-sparse file that really does have 500 MB (or whatever) of zeros, and > takes up 500MB of disk space. > > The Original Poster may want to investigate this web page: > http://rimuhosting.com/howto/rsync.jsp > > James. > > -- > James Wilkinson | "!" sez I. And "?". After a few speechless seconds > Exeter Devon UK | I come out with "%^&*". Unless I come up with > E-mail address: james | something plausible soon I'm going to run out of > @westexe.demon.co.uk | special characters. -- Ben at lspace.org > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
