Re: rsync

[Ethan Baldridge]

On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 15:10 +0100, Matt Oates (Home) wrote:
> 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.
> 

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Note that this is not the same tool as "dd_rescue" - as far as I can
tell GNU ddrescue forked or reimplemented this much earlier tool (which
still sticks around in the Debian repos for some reason,) and is
superior in every way.

-- 
Ethan Baldridge <ethan@superiordocumentservices.com>