On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 12:59:47PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> Your answer is perfectly correct, but a couple of reasons makes me
> want to point up a tried & true tool like rsync. It'll do what the
> man wants while using ssh to cover security, give really nice running
> feedback (if the user likes that sort of thing, I do), and because
> it's basically a lot less general a tool than netcat, it's a bunch
> simpler for an occaisonal user to figure out the parameters on
> ... it's made precisely for this sort of job.
I love rsync for making backups of huge partitions with slowly changing
data. It's absolutely brilliant for that.
But in this situation I would not recommend it:
1) The dump/restore combo is the _only_ alternative that supports all
the features of UFS2 without special options (e.g. flags, ACLs).
2) Rsync will leave old crap on the destination drive, unless you specifiy
the --delete option to rsync, or if you wipe the destination drive
beforehand, in which case rsync's overhead is useless.
3) Rsync will not tranfers file flags unless compiled with a patch,
which is _not_ the default.
4) nc is wickedly fast. When transferring files between my laptop and
desktop it easily saturates the 100 Mbit link between them :)
5) Rsync is in ports, which kinda sucks if you have a broken install and
need to start from a boot/rescue CD. Dump, restore and nc are part of
the base system.
Roland
--
R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (FreeBSD)
iEYEARECAAYFAkl0z0sACgkQEnfvsMMhpyUWUACfTQNHLe9St0Y3T3EPm1n3utu6
0VwAoI3Wiin9gATsDfU36M45MkXw21IV
=tpi6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----