On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 09:00, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote: > 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? NFS mount one drive into the other machine (mounting the source into the target would probably be best) and use 'cp -a'. Or pipe tar output through ssh: tar -cf - . | ssh remote '(cd path && tar -xpf -)' -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx