An interesting quirk

[Brian Kelsay]

The best software to make exact copies are dd and ghost.  Newer tools
worth looking into are partimage and clonezilla.  There is a liveCD
with gparted and clonezilla that I've been looking at lately.  You may
want to check it out.  It is a good idea to make your ghost image or
copy with a tool that does so while the on disk OS is inactive, such
as with a liveCD or DOS boot image.

Brian

On 7/21/07, Billy Crook <> wrote:
> I read the man pace ahead of time, and noticed that little quirk.  i guess i
> understand why it might copy each link to the inode as a seperate file.  It
> makes me wonder though if there's not a better tool for the job of
> replicating a filesystem to another disk aside from dd'ing the whole thing.
>
>
> On 7/21/07, Charles Steinkuehler <> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Billy Crook wrote:
> > > That must be exactly it.  I remember when I formatted crypt, I did
> specifiy
> > > options.  Whereas when I formatted crypt2, I did not.  Can't check to
> make
> > > sure though.  crypt2 will be in a bank vault for 6 months. Crypt3 is in
> the
> > > works though.  Should be ready to play with by next Friday.  Im just
> glad it
> > > wasn't a filesystem error.
> >
> > The other thing that can cause this are hard links, which are *NOT*
> > copied by default when using the -a switch to rsync.  You have to
> > specify --hard-links or you wind up with N actual copies of any
> > hardlinked files, instead of one file and N inodes.
> >
> > - --
> > Charles Steinkuehler
> >