Max .tar/.tgz size?

[iThinkergoiMac]

I just thought all G5 towers had FW800.

Did you forget about the iMac G5?

I concur with chown33, get a FW800 to 400 (9 pin to 6 pin) cable and use TDM on the G5. Transfer speeds are much faster and no need to compress.

 

[Sydde]

Did you forget about the iMac G5?

I concur with chown33, get a FW800 to 400 (9 pin to 6 pin) cable and use TDM on the G5. Transfer speeds are much faster and no need to compress.

It was identified as a G5 Tower, if you scroll up a bit.

Still, since the one external drive is FW400, the 400-to-800 cable will be a needed thing, might as well get one. As I recall, 17 gigs of music loaded onto my FW iPod in something like half an hour, so bypass the extra step of archivng, just move the files and be done with it.

 

[splitpea]

For file-duplication, you may want to look at apps like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. They are designed to make perfect replicas, including xattrs, ACLs, etc. If you aren't a command-line expert on what it takes to make perfect replicas, you should use tools that contain such expertise.

I have SuperDuper. It will only clone a full drive, not a subdirectory. I've tried CCC for backups in the past and ended up with a disaster.

Your earlier terminology is flawed, and conflates two distinct things (ownership and permissions) into one (permissions). Since only root can execute the chown() call, the only way to copy everything is as root. This is all bog standard Unix, from its inception.

I do know the difference between ownership and permissions. Where did I conflate the two? I am aware that I will almost certainly need to chown / chgrp the files once they're copied, using most of the methods discussed. I'm concerned about maintaining the permissions.

Finally, if you don't do a trial run first, and confirm that everything copies perfectly, you're being foolish. Give it files and dirs with every combination of permissions, owners, groups, flags, resource-forks, xattributes, etc. Since it seems to be more important that the transfer occur perfectly exactly once, any effort expended doing trial runs, preflighting, etc. will be worthwhile.

And since almost nothing ever really works perfectly the first time, create a recovery plan so if something goes wrong you can postpone the transition and start over.

Yup, all good ideas.

Have you not looked into why your G5 is not, as you say, 100% stable?

Your task seems impossible because it can be rephrased as:
I want to move everything.
.. except the things that are making my computer crash.

With no clear picture of the exact reasons your computer is crashing then you can't know what to move over EXACTLY keeping permissions and everything.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing that PSDs sitting on the drive aren't making the computer crash, and neither are PHP or Python scripts that aren't being executed when the crashes occur. I've investigated it, found no hardware faults, been told I should reinstall the OS, and decided not to because once I did I'd have to spend about a week reinstalling stuff off MacPorts that I'm not entirely certain how I got configured to work in the first place. Since I was planning on buying a new system soon anyway, I figured I'd live with it for a while.

I don't know why you believe the architecture change makes it harder to upgrade and install. Apple hasn't released any documentation that says, hey don't do this if you're going from PPC to Intel. I used to be a Mac Genius at an Apple store, and this is exactly the stuff I used to do all the time.

It probably doesn't, but I have enough cruft left over in my Library et al from 2002 when I upgraded my old iMac from 10.1.5 to 10.2, and then from the migration from there to this machine that I feel like it's time for a fresh start. What's the worst that happens? I have to tweak my preferences for most of the apps I use?

And to get the MacPorts crap running I've messed around enough with Launchd and other stuff I probably shouldn't have touched that I don't want to bring along any settings other than my keychain. That a fresh profile on the old machine is more stable than my main profile suggests that there's something about the main profile that's related to the stability problems.

Besides, Migration Assistant won't handle the MacPorts stuff even if it didn't have to be recompiled on the new platform (thankfully SL comes with more up-to-date versions of much of that software pre-installed, so I'm only anticipating needing a day or so after the migration), or my data that's under /opt/local.

[quote I just thought all G5 towers had FW800. [/quote]

Turns out you're right -- it does have FW800, but with the old-school original shaped ports. Not that it makes a difference -- I still don't have a cable with the right ports for the MBP.

Just so you know, there are FW800-400 cables that would allow you to connect the two computers via TargetDiskMode.

Still, since the one external drive is FW400, the 400-to-800 cable will be a needed thing, might as well get one.

Yes, I'm aware of FW400/800 cables, but don't really want to bother to buy and wait for delivery of a cable that will be needed exactly once. The drive supports both FW400 and USB2. It's too small to be very useful to me any more anyway, so I was planning to sell it once the transition is complete.

 

[jared_kipe]

Ok, good luck.