On Wednesday 29 December 2010 15:38:22 Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> > or something like this with star:
> > 
> > star -copy -p -xdot -xattr -H=exustar -sparse -M -C /home .
> > /mnt/new_partition
> > 
> > (You can use -V -pat=File1 to exclude files or directories with star, use
> > the -M option to avoid following mount points).
> 
> star -copy by default uses the star "-dump" format which is the "exustar"
> format + extended dump metadata. There is no need to specify the archive
> format with star -copy.
> 
> Also note that star by default uses a safe extract method that calls
> fsync(2) at the end of each single file extract. This is the only way for
> star for being able to detect all possible extract problems. On Linux, the
> file system buffer cache is implemented in a very inefficient way and with
> some COW filesystems (like ZFS), a fsync(2) is an expensive instruction.
> In such cases, you may call star with the -no-fsync option and switch star
> to the same level of "safeness" as other software to speed up the extract
> or copy operation.
> 
> So if you are on Linux and use star -no-fsync, you will not be less secure
> than other software but get aprox. 20% better performance than with other
> copy methods.

Thanks for this Jörg,

I had noticed a small overhead compared to tar and guessed that this may be 
because start undertakes a more thorough check of data.

-- 
Regards,
Mick