[PLUG] Disk-to-disk backup

[mjd-lists-plug@plover.com (Mark Dominus)]

I have two identical hard disks, and I use one as backup space for the
other.  The backup disk is mounted on /backup/home, and every night I
synchronize it with the live files on /home.

I used to do this with rsync, which worked well for a while, but it
has two serious problems.  First, rsync has a bug that causes it to
hang partway through the run more often than not, and I haven't been
able to fix this.  Second, rsync consumes a large amount of memory
while it's running, and so it's slow.  Also, it's more sophisticated
than the job request, since it's optimized to safe network
transmission costs between the source and the destination, at the
expense of CPU time and memory, and in this case the source and the
destination are in the same place.

I've been looking into alternatives.  I wanted to use the standard
'dump' command, since that's fast.  I tried

        /sbin/dump -B1000000 -0u -M -f /backup/home/dump /home

This is supposed to copy the /home filesystem into a series of
/backup/home/dump001, /backup/home/dump002, ... files.  The -B option
limits the size of each volume file to 1GB each, to evade the ext2fs
file extent limit of 2GB.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work for me.
It is nice and fast, but 'dump' consistently gets stuck in the middle
of the first or second volume file, at an apparently unpredictable
point, and hangs indefinitely.

Probably there's a better tool for the job that I don't know about.
Does anyone have any suggestions for some other tool, or some way to
fix one of the problems I mentioned above?
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