rsync mystery, solved

[Karl Larsen]

David Koski wrote:
> On Monday 19 May 2008 16:52, Karl Larsen wrote:
>   
>> Mike Bird wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon May 19 2008 15:55:16 Karl Larsen wrote:
>>>       
>>>>     I have backed up this system to my second hard drive but there is a
>>>> strange problem. Yesterday I found a problem and now this computer is
>>>> running in just 2894892000 bytes. I just backed it up and the size of
>>>> the backup is at least 3549580000 bytes.
>>>>
>>>>     Does anyone know why a backup is larger than the original??
>>>>         
>>> Did the backup use both -H and -S?
>>>
>>> IIRC your root partition was about 2.8GB.  Did it backup
>>> other partitions (e.g. /home or /var/run) in addition to
>>> your root partition?
>>>
>>> --Mike Bird
>>>       
>>     I used neither -H or -S it was a simple backup of the entire system.
>> I used this:
>> sudo rsync -av /boot /bin /dev /etc /initrd /lib /proc /root /sbin /sys
>> /tmp /usr : /mnt
>>     
>
> /proc takes up no space but an rsync copy can.
>
>   
>> and that caused the larger than original backup.
>>     
>
> <snip>
>
> Regards,
> David Koski
> david at kosmosisland.com
>
>   
    Well I did a rsync backup of this computer to a 3 GB partition this 
morning and it was faster than last night and smaller. I used:

 sudo rsync -av -SH /bin /boot /dev /etc /initrd /lib /media /opt  /root 
/sbin  /tmp /usr  /var /vmlinuz : /mnt

and it made a system with:

/dev/sda1              3557744   2824624    552392  84% /mnt

As it happens 2824624 is slightly smaller than this system.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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