rsync dies, need another approach

["Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" <mjc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm trying to copy a large filesystem (around 10M inodes) from on FC4 
computer to another. I need to preserve the symlinks, to minimize 
storage requirements.

The obvious choice is to use rsync -a, but it dies on me (out of memory 
I think - I have 256 MB on the source computer, and rsync uses 100 bytes 
/ file, so 100b x 10M = 1G). Plan B is to actually move the hard drive 
from one computer to the other, and then use cp -al, but I'd rather not 
do that, because the computers aren't easily accessible.

Can anyone suggest a way to copy a large directory structure, while 
preserving symlinks and keeping memory requirements low?


- Mike