Hi, On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 10:34:14AM -0700, Amit D Chaudhary wrote: > > rsync, tar etc. will all do backups well. rsync in particular is > > pretty smart about doing copies between full filesystems. > Thanks for reply. > > I assume this will go through the vfs cache filling it up for a one time > operation. Is there any way of avoiding that, something like a raw i/o > mechanism. Not right now. O_DIRECT isn't supported by dump/tar etc. Note, btw, that dump will have exactly the same problem. Using one of the current VMs (ie. aa or rmap, not plain linux-2.4) tends to improve the behaviour of the VM to the point where it's just not a problem any more, in many cases. With rmap on my main development system, large copies of multiple iso images don't have anything like the massive performance penalty we used to see with important data getting swapped out by the copy. Cheers, Stephen
