I want to copy (not move) my Timeshift Snapshots (Rsync) from my existing drive to another drive. Both drives are ext4. As far as I searched I am not able to find any viable results.
If not possible, just why?
Solved
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-apple-osx-bsd-rsync-copy-hard-links/
TLDR
sudo rsync -az -H --delete --numeric-ids /path/to/timeshift path/to/destination/
Where,
-a
: Archive mode (i.e. recurse into directories, and preserve symlinks, file permissions, file modification times, file group, file owner, device files & special files)
-z
: Compress file data during the transfer
H
: Preserve hard links (i.e. copy hard links as hard links)
--delete
: Delete extraneous files from the receiving side (ones that aren’t on the sending side), but only for the directories that are being synchronized i.e. keep exact replica of your /path/to/timeshift
directory.
--numeric-ids
: Transfer numeric group and user IDs rather than using user and group names and mapping them at both ends.
--progress
: Show progress during transfer.
--log-file="/var/log/my-rsync-script.log"
: Log what rsync command is doing to the /var/log/my-rsync-script.log file.
Thanks to @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
Original Comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/11611743
Nice addition of solution.
In time Lemmy will replace reddit for tech questions. Give it a few years!
Surely just copying the files over should do the job? For a single snapshot, that is, otherwise you’ll probably be duplicating a lot of deduplicated space by copying every file out of every backup.
I believe using rsync and telling it to maintain hard links should work.
Surely just copying the files over should do the job?
It gives me an error ‘cannot copy special files’. Even when doing as root.
The article confuses me a bit. But I’ll look into it.
Thank you.
It seems to me like the copy utility you’re using (file manager?) doesn’t maintain soft links/hard links. You may need a command line tool to do the copying that does support it, like rsync, or a different GUI tool (though I admit I don’t know for sure what GUI tools specifically support this).
Yeah I was using Nemo.
rsync
Can you give me some guidance on how to copy using snaps rsync in CLI, please?
Thanks man. It worked.
Can’t remember if this had mv in scope, still good to keep on radar
My snapshot is rsync on ext4.
Thanks anyways.
Have you looked at Clonezilla?
I already have several files on the drive which I want to copy the snapshots.
Won’t clonezilla replace everything?
it will, yes. Which is good if you want to keep everything from from the source drive but bad if you want to keep everything from the destination drive.