[H-GEN] Hardware Upgrade

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
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Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> writes:

> If you're using tar make sure you don't copy /proc and don't bother with
> /tmp, /var/tmp, your cdrom or floppy as these may get caught up in a
> blanket tar of the system.

One other note about GNU tar:  the last time I used it to transfer a
(large) filesystem, I realized only after restarting it two or three
times that the software does not modify permissions at the destination
until *after* the transfer of files is complete.

Noticing that everything is owned root:root while the transfer is in
progress can cause you to wonder if you got the options right (god
knows it's not always a simple task).

Oh, and if you're transferring over a network it can be a good idea to
compress the data before sending it; if you're copying (say) email and
source code this can give significant savings and thus speedups, if
you've got the CPU and memory to spare.

> I again reiterate my preference for dump/restore.  Unfortunetaly reiserfs
> doesn't support any utilities like dump/restore but this is unlikely to
> effect you :)

This is a major deficiency, and yet another reason I will not use
reiserfs.

> For those interested, xfs has xfsdump & xfsrestore (such utilities
> are common in the unix world).

Not to mention a "don't back up this file" file attribute.  Very handy
for those laptop disk images that would otherwise fill your backup
media.
-- 
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| ``I think I'm going to throw up.''                                    |
|                                             -- Kermit the Frog, Yambo |
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