Re: Transfer of Files

From: Logan Shaw (lshaw-usenet_at_austin.rr.com)
Date: 09/25/05 

Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 22:20:56 GMT

Bhushan wrote:
> I have one AIX server , which is now replaced by Sun Solaris 9
> server. So i wanted to copy/move data from this AIX server to Solaris
> server by keeping permisions(set UID , set GID),user,group ownership ,
> etc as it is . How can i achive this.

I would look at using "rsync -a". The "-a" option means "archive mode",
which causes it to preserve links, permissions (i.e. file mode, i.e.
"-rwxr-xr-x"), times, groups, owners, and even devices. Not that you
should be copying devices over.

You might also want to look at the "-S" option if you have sparse files,
and "--progress" can be helpful since 100 GB will take a while.

Speaking of which, you can safely interrupt rsync while running and it
should resume where it left off next time, although doing this will
increase the total time required since it has to re-check files. This
could be helpful if the files aren't constantly changing, because you
can do a full sync sometime convenient (at night or over the weekend)
and then do another, quicker sync when you're ready to make the real
switchover. If you do this, you might want to add "--delete" to the
options on subsequent syncs so that if files were deleted from the
original, they are deleted on the copy as well. Which reminds me,
adding "-n" will do a dry run that doesn't actualy modify files, and
it might be safer to try with "-n" before doing it for real.

If you're running over ssh, you might want to tweak your ssh options
to turn off compression and use a faster cypher in order to get a
faster transfer.

Obviously, there are lots of options to rsync, and also your files are
presumably important, so it might be worthwhile to study the manual
page carefully and do a few tests beforehand.

   - Logan