Re: rsync

[Matt Oates (Home)]

On 12 May 2011 14:57, guerrier <guerrier@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Matt Oates (Home) <mattoates@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>> Is parallel a great idea here?
>
> That's my real question.  I have a failing hdd, from which i would
> like to move as much data as possible as fast possible.

If it was me I'd chuck in a blank USB disk and use the 'dd' command to
just verbatim copy the partition/disk over, this is about as quick as
you are going to get. You can either do that to an image file on the
USB disk (with/without compression) or possibly more preferably write
the partition straight to the USB device and have the filesystem put
straight on to there. If it's a remote host it might be worth just
doing scp -C since it will ignore any indexing of files and stuff that
rsync does (not sure if rsync does this if the remote destination is
empty anyway?). Parallel is likely to make a sick disk sicker at this
point as the different parallel file reads will cause the heads to
move all over the place! dd reads sequential blocks from the disk
(ignoring the filesystem) so it's fast and limits the work on the hard
disk.

http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd

Best of luck!
Matt.