[plug] formatting new external usb hardrive

[W.Kenworthy]

comments inline:

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 08:33 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 07:11, William Kenworthy wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 19:18 +0800, Sol wrote:
> > 
> > Personnel comment - avoid ext3 if theres any chance of a premature
> > powerdown/unplug: I changed back to reiserfs, and after a couple of
> > crashes/resets theres still no errors, unlike what has happened with
> > ext3.  ext3 has a data=journelled option which may help in some cases.
> 
> Good tip, thanks.  Since enjoying the benefits of ext3 over ext2 I have
> become blinkered to other filesystems. 
Should have made clear that this was on a laptop, not a pluggable drive,
but the issues are similar.

> 
> > I found rsync did not work well in the context of full system backups.
> > It ran out of memory very quickly with many thousands of files and also
> > took a long time.  Use "unison" which uses the rsync protocol, but makes
> > better use of it for this purpose.  
> 
> I seem to remember, from a period lurking on the rsync list, that the
> rule of thumb with it is that you need twice the size of the backup/copy
> volume/files on the target disk for the temporary file writes before
> rsync completes. 
> 
Yes (that is you need space for any increase in the number of files and
their sizes, as well as enough space that the largest file involved can
be duplicated during the rsync process), but this was independent of
that gotcha - rsync just ran out of internal (heap?) space to hold its
internal list of files to operate on.

Its not critical in that when rsync started failing, I just moved to
unison and using the same archives just got on with it.

BillK

> HTH, Gavin.
> 
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