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Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:53:24 +0000
From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com>
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To: Christian Walther <cptsalek@gmail.com>, 
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Data Recovery
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Christian Walther wrote:

> I don't think that rsync can cope with hardlinks.

yes it can.  From the man page:

        -H, --hard-links            preserve hard links

Slower, but it copes.

> Best way to do a "backup" like this is:
>
> tar -clf - / | ( cd /ad2 ; tar -xf - ) 

Only if you want to copy every shred of data regardless of whether it 
changed or not, as was previously noted.

--Alex

PS Backup gets used to mean at least two different things:

    1) A single, separate copy of the "data" for which rsync is great.  
Read the manpage as it has lots of configuration potential.

    2) Effectively a partial transaction history for the data where you 
can recover a file as it was, say, a week ago, for which dump and 
restore are your friends.  There's also a tool in the ports which does 
something similar with rsync and separate trees named, I think, by date, 
which is great if you have lots of disk space.  Or you can use 
snapshots, and again there is a tool in the ports whose name eludes me. 

  cd /usr/ports
  make search name=rsync
  make search name=snapshot

if you care.