copying just / (not /tmp, /usr, etc) (rsync -x failed)

[James Harrison]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 10:41 -0500, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 05:38:20PM -0700, Steve Franks wrote:
> 
> > I have / on one slice, and [usr,tmp,var] on others.  I want to move
> > just / to a new disk, which seemed to be what rsync -x ("do not cross
> > filesystems") was intended for.  It failed, however, as df shows 20k
> > blocks in /, and rsync filled up the target slice with 50k blocks, so
> > obviously it blew right past the 'end' of / - did I miss something? Is
> > there no other way except to umount [tmp,usr,var]?
> 
> I would use dump/restore.
> 
> Build the filesystem in the new disk partition with fdisk, bsdlabel
> and newfs as needed. Then mount the new partition somewhere - 
> example:    
>   mkdir /newpart
>   mount /dev/ad1s1a /newpart 
>         (presuming new disk is ad1, slice is 1, partition is a)
>   Doesn't hurt to do an fsck on it here before writing to it, but it
>   probably isn't really needed.
> 
> Then, run the dump/restore
> 
>   cd /newpart
>   dump 0af - / | restore -rf -
> 
> This will get all of / as you want.  The other mountpoints for /tmp, /usr
> and /var will be copied, but not the contents of those filesystems.  You
> probably want that.
> 
> ////jerry
> 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Steve

Everyone's recommending dump/restore for copying file systems, and
there's something that I've never really been clear on.

The nice thing about rsync is that it's network aware. Can dump dump a
file system across a network?

James