recursive snapshots directories

[Thomas Nikolajsen]

>Today I tried to copy everything in /var/crash to my Linux box (I'm going to 
>submit the crash dumps). I start scp running and go out to work. Over four 
>hours later, it's still running, the root partition is full, and I stop scp 
>and look at the Linux box. The snapshots directory contains directories like 
>snapshots/snap-20100122-0306/snapshots/snap-20091224-0303/snapshots/, and 
>it's taking forever to rm -rf them. What is going on?

Don't follow symlinks when you copy.
The snapshot are accessed by the snap-... files (e.g. snap-20091224-0303);
if you also would like to copy those, then copy them individually.

'scp -r' will follow symlinks; a quick read of the scp man page didn't
show possibility to disable that. I'm not sure how symlink loops are handled here;
maybe just a max value; this would give quite a lot of 'extra' files.
Man 7 symlink suggests otherwise.

 -thomas