Robin Laing wrote:
What is the best way of copying *entirely* one's home directory to an
external hard disk?
tar
I will vote against tar.
I used it for a backup some time ago and just this past weekend, I had
to recover 4 files. Due to the size of the tar file, it took ages. I
am talking hours.
With the cost of drives today, I would just use cp -a. I have not used
rsync so I cannot comment on that.
There would be almost no difference on the first run except that you can
interrupt and restart without repeating what had been completed. On a
subsequent update, only the changes are copied so it can be hundreds of
times faster. Plus, if you add -essh (the default for recent versions)
and a host: on the source or destination, the syntax is the same for
remote copies that are just as efficient.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
