[Dirvish] Copying dirvish vaults (heavily hard linked)

[Shawn (Red Mop)]

On Thursday 06 March 2008 11:28:31 am Keith Lofstrom wrote:
<snip>
> "Almost nothing", unfortunately, can be a big difference.  When I was
> testing, tar did not produce bootable images, because some of the special
> files did not copy.   Perhaps it has been improved.  rsync does produce
> bootable images (if it did not, then dirvish wouldn't be very useful).
>
> My point is that these file copy tools can take a surprisingly long
> time.  My 500GB backup drive is now about 70% full, with about 100
> images on it (I do not expire them), meaning that to some tools, on
> the file level, the drive appears to contain around 60 terabytes.
> A drive copy at the file level will attempt to traverse a large
> fraction of that 60TB;  if the interface is running at 20MB/sec
> that will take a large fraction of 800 hours.  Yikes!
>
<snip>

Actually, tar can create bootable images.  Gentoo stage3 images does that very 
thing.  All you need to do after untaring the stage 3 file is compile a 
kernel and grub/lilo, and off you go.  Is it the happiest of boots?  No, not 
really.  It does work, however.  I've also used netcat and tar to copy a 
build on an old machine from a new one that compiled the packages with 
Gentoo.  After that, I setup grub, and booted away.