Re: [Fstransform-devel] preservation of hard links

[Olaf L. <ol...@me...>]

Heya!

> On the good side, it's quite well tested, it works with file systems 
> full up to 95% (90% on XFS), and can even resume a job after a crash
> or power failure.

90% when converting to or when converting from XFS?
 
> On the bad side, it is quite slow (1GB/minute on a single hard disk)
> and actually the main problem is that if it fails catastrophically,
> you have no backup.

Not having a backup is not such a big deal in our case, this is a
backup server. The original data is on our file server. We'd only loose
the time evolution of the files from the file server.

> Yes, it preserves hard links. In order to do that, it keeps an
> in-memory cache of hard links found so far. If the cache gets larger
> than available RAM, it starts swapping to disk and you're in trouble:
> it will take ages to finish, or, if it runs out of swap space, it
> will crash.

Actually, I can't really guess how many hard links are there on this
partition. The server has 8 GiB of RAM + 8 GiB of swap... I'll try and
report back how it worked.

Best,
Olaf