What's best way to copy a filesystem? [was: Re: slight emergency here...]

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 06:34:22PM -0500, Jon Hamilton wrote:
> Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org>, said on Sun Oct 28, 2007 [03:02:03 PM]:
> 
> } > 	At any rate, how do i as root, single user, cp -rp all of /var to
> } > 	elsewhere (/storage) and rmdir /var, them mkdir /var and copy
> } > 	everything back?? I've forgotten the cpio magic command. 
> } > 
> } 	The nutshelll of this posting could be: What's the best tool 
> } 	to copy a /FILESYSTEM to /storage/FILESYSTEM?
> 
> The best tool is the one you use successfully.  If you're really talking about
> a whole filesystem, dump and restore may contain the least surprises in 
> unusual situations:
> 
> $ newfs /dev/whatever
> $ mount /dev/whatever /mnt
> $ cd /dev/whatever
> $ dump 0af - /old_filesystem | restore -rf -
> 
> Then delete /mnt/restoresymtable when it's all done.
> 
> Of course you can use tar, cpio, cpdup if you have it, or even cp.  At 
> different points in time historically some of those have had problems with 
> some situations like sparse files, "extra" hard links, symlinks, etc. 
> 


	Seems like I'm running into inode problems.... I finally 
	tar'd  /var to a /temp fs, then forgot to do the newfs.  So now 
	I've got a fs panic.

	Hope it isn't a bad drive.....  

	thanks.

	gary


> -- 
> 
>    Jon Hamilton 
>    hamilton at pobox.com

-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
      http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org