Re: [BackupPC-users] hard drive replacement

[John P. <jp...@cl...>]

David Relson wrote:
> Good Evening,
>
> The drive with my BackupPC files on it is generating "I/O error"
> messages and reiserfsck's recommendation is, once a drive is reporting
> errors, it's nearing the end of its life and ought to be replaced.
>
> As I'd like to preserve my old backups, I'm looking for the best way
> to copy files from an old drive to a new one.  As best I can tell the
> procedure is (roughly):
>
> cp -a /mnt/old/pool /mnt/new/pool
> BackupPC_tarPCCopy /mnt/old/pc | tar xf - /mnt/new/pc
>
> Anything of significance missing from this scenario?
>
>   
If you can do it using DD to copy the raw partition (and growing the fs 
as appropriate afterwards) will be way quicker.  If you can do that I 
strongly recommend s-tar as it seems to cope with millions of hard links 
without barfing or using all of your memory.  The thrid option is to 
just keep the old drive around (offline) but do a new install for the 
new drive - you'll only need the old drive if you have to go back to 
find a deleted file - depending on how often you do that it may not be 
worth going to all the trouble of copying the data.

John