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Re: rsync seems to hang when asked to update backup of large disk

I think we've figured out the isssues with rsync and the various options,
and a good option seems to have been implemented and working for JN.

But if you must know, I mostly use fdisk. I started using gparted a while
ago when aligning disks to 4k boundaries was a pain with fdisk.  I still
use gparted to move / grow / shrink partitions and filesystems when I can,
but only because it is far more convenient.  I will use fdisk / resize2fs
if gparted is not available, eg on headless servers, or, if nothing else,
then parted.  I'm (almost) completely tool agnostic, I just pick what works
best for me for the task at hand.

Raj.


On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 12:35 PM Alex Pilon <alp [ at ] alexpilon [ dot ] ca> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 09:33:29AM -0500, tf [ at ] greenbullfrog [ dot ] com wrote:
> > As hinted-at in the post from Raj, the modern-day partition utility is
> > parted (cli). The GUI equivalent is gparted. You can query your drive
> with:
>
> Pardon me, but how is parted more “modern”? Can you explain? I'm not
> sure that's what Raj said or meant, though, though Raj ought have the
> right to speak for thyself.
>
> > On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 12:05:41PM -0500, Raj wrote:
> >> Most modern drives now are 4k physical
> >> sectors, using 512 is going to result in reduced performance + life, so
> you
> >> want to reformat to 4k as soon as possible.  It was also necessary to
> align
> >> to the 4k boundary, but I believe fdisk/gparted does it automatically
> now
>
> Unless you're on some terribly out of date version of util-linux¹, like
> used to be shipped forever in some older version of CentOS, RHEL,
> Ubuntu, Debian, etc., fdisk is usable, shipped by default, correct, and
> includes things not in parted like protected and hybrid MBR
> manipulation, partition table dumping to file, partition renumbering²,
> etc.
>
> It's also more “upstream”.
>
> The issue at hand was not the tool, just understanding what the output
> meant.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex Pilon
>
> ¹: Where's my coloured dmesg -H? Where are all the fields for
>    blkid/lsblk?
> ²: Yes, some OEM installs are weird. Proceed at own risk in case they
>    didn't just use PART/FS UUIDs.
>