Hello,
I'm looking for some assistance in modifying the rsync code
Situation: I used to back-up some of my (unmounted NTFS) disk partitions remotely using the following shells construct:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip | ssh me@backupmachine 'cat > /backup-dir/hda1-backup.gz'
But now I want to use rsync for this, since transfering 10 gig takes a litle to long if a file of a few kB has changed :-). I looked trough the archive and found an old mail talking about the same problem, and a response explaining the problem of writting to a block device (since rsync writes a copy file and then moves it over the original). But the same mail also said that reading from it should be trivial, so I set out trying to implement this.
So I created a '--read-block-file' option in options.c and avoided the 'skipping non regular file' message in generator.c
By altering all this the receiver is ready to get the data, but in the flist structure it still says that '/dev/hda1' is still a devicefile
and that the size is 0, and so the sender does send over zero bytes
Now here is the problem : How do I get the size of partition in this datastructure ? Or more generique, how would I handle this for /dev/fd0, since you can insert 1.44MB disks or 720kB disks ?
Anybody else tried to read blockdevices over rsync already ?
After all, sending the data of a block device doesn't seem to be as trivial as the archived mail sugested :-)
David
