Rsync woes

[thesun]

I'm hoping an Rsync guru can help me out with what is hopefully a simple problem. I have a relatively full hard disk (160GB at 98% full or so) and have been trying to use Rsync to copy the entire contents of my home directory to a second (slave) disk, which is huge (500GB). Midway through the procedure I always get a write error saying that the disk is full. I'm assuming it's the one that's 98%...and that a temp file or something is being created as the copying goes on, and that it gets too big, and then the process fails.

Anything I can do to prevent this? Or am I forced to rsync in pieces, directory by directory, or something like that?

My rsync command line looks like this:

rsync -avz --exclude=*.rpm --exclude=*.gz --exclude=*.tar --exclude=/.* --include=/.kde /home/myhomedir/ /mnt/big500GBdrive/backups/mybackup/

Thanks for any and all help.

[danwaineo]

Why are you using rsync? It's not very efficient for just coping a bunch of files. I'd try to just copy them over. I'm not sure, but something like this should do it:

cp -a /home/myhomedir /mnt/big500GBdrive/backups/mybackup

it would probably be best to use tar, but I'm not sure of the of the protocol. Maybe something like this?:

tar -zcvf /home/myhomedir /mnt/big500GBdrive/backups/mybackup.tgz