Re: How to preserve soft link creation times in copy/move?

Winnie Lacesso wrote:
We wish to migrate a filesystem from one machine (hardware RAID5 ) to
another, whilst preserving everything including soft-link creation times.

There is no "creation" time on standard UNIX filesystems, but there
is the ctime - the inode change time, perhaps that's what you're
referring to.

Probably the simplest approach:
Have the source filesystem unmounted, or mounted read-only
Have target filesystem device of same or larger size and not mounted
Use dd(1) to copy the data (read from source device file, write to
target device file).
That will create an identical filesystem for you (if the target device
is larger, one can generally grow the filesystem to that size, if
desired).
Take care to change any items that should NOT be identical (e.g.
filesystem UUID identifiers, or similar items).
For distinct systems, the data can be piped over ssh(1), or transfered
via other means (e.g. tape).

Some flavors of dump/restor commands might also possibly work, but
that was already touched upon in another post.

.

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