Re: Migrate OS to smaller drive?

On 2010-04-11 15:54, Sjoerd Hardeman wrote:
Ron Johnson schreef:
On 2010-04-11 08:11, Clive McBarton wrote:
Sjoerd Hardeman wrote:
mount the new device (mount -odev /dev/newdevice), and do a
rsync -ax / /media/newdevice.
What exactly is the advantage of this approach over "cp -a" or "mv"?

I would have suggested mv. It has the useful property that you can
easily spot aborted transfers by the fact that the original device is
not empty afterwards.
One note is that I've had issues where symlinks remain pointing to the old drive. (That was a long time ago, though, and maybe I did something
wrong.)
I thought symlinks keep point via a file location memo, like "look at
/usr/share/the/file/you/want", which is the old location just after
copying, but the new location when you boot from your new device and
that becomes root.


Note how at the bottom or this example bar/shoe still points to ../snuffle/shoe/. When you try to "cp -axv / /some/new/root" the same thing will happen. In /usr/bin all the symlinks to /etc/alternatives will still point to the *current* /etc/alternatives not to /some/new/root/etc/alternatives.

$ mkdir foo/snaggle snuffle/shoe
$ cd foo
$ ln -sf ../snuffle/shoe .
$ dir
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 3 me me 4096 2010-04-11 17:12:44 ./
drwxr-xr-x 206 me me 36864 2010-04-11 17:12:04 ../
lrwxrwxrwx 1 me me 15 2010-04-11 17:12:44 shoe -> ../snuffle/shoe/
drwxr-xr-x 2 me me 4096 2010-04-11 17:12:04 snaggle/

$ cd ..
$ cp -av foo bar
`foo' -> `bar'
`foo/snaggle' -> `bar/snaggle'
`foo/shoe' -> `bar/shoe'

$ dir bar
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 3 me me 4096 2010-04-11 17:12:44 ./
drwxr-xr-x 207 me me 36864 2010-04-11 17:13:54 ../
lrwxrwxrwx 1 me me 15 2010-04-11 17:12:44 shoe -> ../snuffle/shoe/
drwxr-xr-x 2 me me 4096 2010-04-11 17:12:04 snaggle/

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