Howto move a 13GB filesystem on80GB into a 20GB

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 12 May 2006, Alex Marandon wrote:

> I had to do that recently and I used rsync with its -a option which

I wouldn't use rsync for that.  It is _really_ slow in comparison to the 
alternatives.

The canonical answer is "tar" but alternatives include cpio or even dump. 
For XFS the recommended solution is xfsdump.

For tar it is worth using -X.  Eg:

tar -X /tmp/exclude.file -cf alldata.tar /

/tmp/exclude.file should include, as a minimum:

/cdrom
/floppy
/mnt
/proc
/tmp
/var/tmp

Stop reading here unless you're really keen :)

It is possible to pipe data directly from one tar to another, even over 
ssh, to avoid the need to create a seperate tar file.  More info here:

http://www.opentrend.net/movingfilesystems.shtml

These instructions are a bit scanty, I need to add to that.  The exact 
syntax has varied between different versions of Gnu tar as well.

Cheers,

Rob

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