Best way to copy a volume?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

The goal here is to move my OS2 install from the current 850 Evo SSD to the new 860 Evo SSD (250G to 500G).

In the past I've relied on the good ol' trusty XCOPY (/h /o /t /s /e /r /v), followed by the SYSINSTX, etc. The only downside to this approach is the fact that all the directory date/time-stamps are the CURRENT sysdate values and the old stuff is not preserved.

I'd like to avoid that outcome.

My thinking is that I could execute the XCOPY first (from within my maintenance partition) followed by a RSYNC run to get all the other stuff nice 'n' tidy. Haven't tried this yet on a test partition, most likely will though just to be sure.

I have seen people talk of archiving the source volume, so literally toss everything into a ZIP file and un-zip in the target drive. Yup, I could do this given that I have a couple of spare drives (that do nightly volume backups), but I'm thinking there must be some kind of ZIP file size limitation here to deal with...?

In the meantime, can anyone suggest an alternative and/or perhaps better way to go about this? Maybe DFSEE has an option I should pursue? The only caveat here is that the volume sizes are different (source is 250G and target is 500G).

Beyond that, at the hardware level, do we worry about the 4k alignment for the SSDs? The FS is JFS, but having tried this once before (when originally moving from a HDD to the SSD) and running into some major screwups (lost a volume that way but managed to re-cover from the nightly backup..yey!) I'm hesitant to try this again.

Thanks!

[Pete]

Hi Dariusz

Yes, DFSee would be my choice. If you have a Registration you can get advice from Jan on the best way to proceed - if not you have a bit of reading and testing to do  :-)


Regards

Pete

[Ian B Manners]

Hi Dariusz,

I replicate my primary drive with two partitions to rotating backup HD's.

Use LVM to create create a new bootable partion on the new HD (or SSD), if required create your non bootable partition(s) as well.
I prefer to boot from DVD to create the new partitions with the old HD disconnected, makes life a lot easier in picking a bootable partition.

After that its simple to use rsync or dsync after a normal boot, your new HD will be assigned new drives if your original is for example C drive etc.
As I have a 500G HD, I use a C drive of 3G and a D drive as my data drive. With the DVD as E drive the first free drive is F:

Rsync
rsync -qaX2 --stats --delete --log-file=Backup_rsync.log C:\  F:\
rsync -qaX2 --stats --delete --log-file=Backup_rsync.log D:\  G:\

or using dsync, create a config file ( I do this with rsync as well but for simplicity I have ignored that above).

"dsync backup2newHD.cfg"

backup2newHD.cfg contains:

Code: [Select]

LogFile = backup2newHD.log
EconomeCPU = 50
UseArchive = On

SrcPath = C:\
DstPath = F:\

SrcPath = D:\
DstPath = G:\
IgnorePath = D:\temp

"IgnorePath = D:\temp" is an example, my temp dir's are all on ram drives.
I also like my log files to check for "error:"

dsync and rsync can be found in regular download sites, and there are many ways to personalise both programs.

There is also DFSee though I've not used that yet for this purpose.
All of these ways will provide you with replicated drives that retain date/time stamps etc.
(Edited to fix grammar)

[Neil Waldhauer]

zip and unzip also preserve timestamps. zip the old drive and unzip to the new drive.

[Doug Bissett]

I agree with Neil. ZIP, and UNZIP. Just use the ZIP/UNZIP as supplied by RPM/YUM, or you are limited to 2 GB in, and 2 GB out. Be sure to use the parameters -9yrS to get everything saved, correctly.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Thanks for the ideas you guys!

Alright, I'm going to do a test run copying just my MAINTENANCE partition using RSYNC. This is primarily because I already do my nightly backups using this method and have the scripts and logs all defined and in-place. So in effect this just becomes another run I need to do.

ZIP would work, but boy, there is something uncomfortable about having ALL of that data crunched that way (about 134G at the moment).

RE: DFSEE, I need to look into this further. I was under the impression that it had a "binary copy" type of functionality...which if capable of moving a SOURCE to a TARGET volume of different size would in fact be the cat's meow!

Thanks again everyone.

[ivan]

Hi Dariusz,

DFSee does in fact do that - it was the only way I could get OS/2 installed on my first Ryzen based computer.

As for zipping up hard disks, not a problem and I have well over a TB of data and programs spread over 12 partitions on 3 2 TB drives on my main computer - each partition is stored as a zip file on the main NAS box and said series of zips are used to recreate my working environment on a new computer.