[Cialug] Moving Linux from one disk to another

[John Lengeling]

I love/hate rsync...mainly hate.   When you copy data from one place to
another you want the tool to simply make an identical copy at the
destination.  The problem with rsync is that it doesn't do that unless
you get the options just right.   I always seem to have to run rsync
several times to discover the right options and then having to perform a
recursive diff to verify that the source and destination are identical.
It should just assume that by default.

My other pet peeve is when you are rsyncing to a new unpopulated
destination it takes way too long.   Just today I was trying to copy 4G
from Des Moines to Boca Raton and the performance is poor compared to
ftping a tarball.   There is too much per file overhead which slows it
down.   

You have to create an initial copy at the destination using a tarball
then run rsync to pick up any of the differences.   This is the one
thing that rsync does well.

Give me "tar | (cd /dir; tar)" any day.  It just works as
expected...more often than rsync.

johnl