I second other people's recommendations of rsync. rsync is great.
There's another possibility, though, that has some of the same
advantages. With rsync, you can do a preliminary copy that does
everything while the system is live, and then schedule a hopefully
short downtime to update just those things that have changed.
Dump/restore should be able to do the same thing. While your filer is
up and serving, dump/restore everything at level 0. (You can do this
by rsh'ing the dump to the old filer and the restore to the new server,
of course.)
Then, when you have downtime scheduled, dump/restore at level 1 (making
sure there were no intervening level 0 dumps). That way, you're only
copying the changes, and the dump/restore will be much quicker.
(Obviously, because you're going over the net, this is going to be
slower than something like "vol copy". However, you can do the level
0 dump without interrupting service, so probably you only care about
the time taken by the level 1 dump.)
Basically, that amounts to doing by hand what rsync does automatically.
Probably a bit more efficient than rsync (because less general).
-j.
Jay Sekora
<jay(a)ccs.neu.edu>
Unix Systems Administrator
Northeastern University
College of Computer Science