Can I move Cygwin and Cygwin64 to a drive other than C: ?

[Eric Pement]

Follow-up question for Corinna or anyone who might know the answer:

> >On Apr  1 03:26, Robert Miles wrote:
> > >>Can I move the entire Cygwin and Cygwin64 directory trees to one
> > >>of the nearly empty drives, without losing the extra packages I've
> > >>already downloaded and the files I've created?
> > >
> > >Robocopy allows to copy an entire Cygwin tree while keeping all
> > >permissions intact.  I had good luck with something along the
> > >lines of
> > >
> > >   robocopy C:\cygwin64 D:\cygwin64 /e /purge /z /copyall /sl
. . .
With an added comment that
> I *did* move Cygwin installations using
> robocopy and the above works for me.  In an elevated shell.

I recently needed to move a Cygwin installation, about 6 GB, to
another drive accessible only on a network file system. Due to the
number of files, copying everything would have taken a week or more,
because everything slows down when the number of files increases.

The solution I ultimately took was not the best. I compressed
everything into a single *.7z (7-zip) archive, moved the single
archive across the network, and uncompressed the *.7z archive on the
target machine.

Although the total time was much, much faster (maybe 5 or 6 hours,
including 30 minutes to uncompress the archive), all my file
permissions were set to the same value, regardless of what they had
been previously, and any extended attributes were lost entirely.

I didn't like it, but I had no realistic alternative.

For future resource, what is the best way to archive a Cygwin
installation into a single file, which will preserve all file
properties and permissions, so that the archive can be transferred to
another location? (For the sake of clarity, presume that Cygwin does
NOT exist in the target location, so a non-Cygwin tool must be used to
expand the archive.)

Thanks in advance.

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