[ILUG] How to copy some files

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 15:22:26 +0100
  | From: "Matthew French" <mfrench42 at yahoo.co.uk>
  | 
  | Niall asked:
  |  > I have about 60G of data which I need to copy from one disk to
  |  > another.  [ ... ] The problem is the bulk of the data [ ... ]
  |  > have two directory entries i.e. there is a hard link [ ... ]
  | 
  | How about something like:
  | 
  |    cd {dest.dir}
  |    tar -C {source.dir} cf - | tar xf -
  | 
  | tar cf - will pipe the tar file to stdout and tar xf - will untar it. This
  | should keep permissions and links, and if you do it as root you will keep
  | the owners too... :)
  | 
  | Not tested, though. You may need other flags as well.

 the above (or something close to it) will work.

 however, the data will be read and written twice by the
 1st (source) `tar', and read twice by the 2nd (sink) `tar',
 albeit only written once as the sink realizes the second
 copy is a hard link to the first.  with c.60Gb of data,
 that will make a difference, at least in time and CPU
 resource consumed (albeit, in this case, not storage).

 the issue here is tar(1) (and cpio(1)) archives always
 contain the data for each name of a hard link.  this is
 (probably) for several reasons, and is not necessarily a
 bad thing.   e.g., it provides a degree of redundancy to
 help cope with bad media.

 the source `tar' is creating an archive, which is being
 written down the pipe (to be consumed by the sink `tar').
 that is why storage is not an issue per se here, as the
 full archive is not "saved" --- if it were, you'd need
 at least 2x60Gb, or over 120Gb!   (the extra is `tar's
 overhead, which is minimal but does add up, esp. when
 a "large" blocking factor is used.)

cheers!
	-blf-
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