rsync is bad

[Les Mikesell]

Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> In case you weren't following, the rsync copy did work after he got the
>> copies mounted correctly.   You are right that rsync can't deal with
>> files that change while being copied, but the OS itself doesn't change
>> when running and the logfiles, etc. that would change don't break
>> anything if they aren't exactly the same in the copy.  Rsync wouldn't be
>> a good choice to copy an active database, but it works fine for running
>> programs.
> 
> I would suggest that the man pages are misleading. In reading them I got 
> the impression that the program was designed to copy individual files and 
> not an entire system.

Files are about all there is to a unix-like system.  Rsync does 
approximately the same thing as tar, which is also usable to copy a 
system as long as you create and format more or less matching partitions 
and filesystems and set up grub to make it bootable.  You probably 
couldn't make that work under Windows, though.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com