Slow disk access while rsync - what should I tune?

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

cronfy <cronfy at gmail.com> wrote:

> And also, maybe there are other ways to create incremental backups
> instead of using rsync/hardlinks?

Yes.  Use dump(8) -- that's what it's for.  It reads the inodes,
directories, and files directly from the disk device, thereby
eliminating stat() overhead entirely.

Any replication mechanism -- rsync, tar, even dd -- can be used
as a backup mechanism, but dump was specifically designed for the
purpose.