Dump/Restore for system migration

[Chris Maness]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:10 AM, markham breitbach <
markhamb at corp.ssimicro.com> wrote:

>
> On 2015-01-19 5:05 PM, Polytropon wrote:
> >> Is there a better way to do this?
> > Usually not, because dump + restore is _the_ way to do it.
> > Except of course you're using ZFS. :-)
> I have often done system migrations using rsync over ssh something like
>
> rsync -aHv / root at targethost:/
>
> The great thing about rsync is that is will only transfer what it needs
> to, so the first run will take a while to get pretty much everything
> over.  I then run a second time with a --delete switch to catch anything
> that changed while the first run was going (A full sync of my mail store
> can take well over 24 hours!).  The second run will go much faster,
> depending on the size of the initial run.  Finally, I will mount RO, so
> I know nothing is changing and run a final sync, which usually only
> takes a couple of minutes, then light up the new system.
>
> If you already have a system dump/restore you could also just use rsync
> as the final step to catch the stragglers.
>
> -Markham
>
>
>

That actually sounds pretty good.  The target system has been running for a
few days source system powered off.  I am not sure if a rsync right now
would do more harm than good.  However, I do understand that rsync will
ignore files that have already changed.

I use rsync -vaur flags on most of my backups.

Thanks,
Chris