I think Tony wanted us first to all agree on which switches to use...
I did some serious disk juggling & copying back and forth when upgrading and at the same time moving from a MkI to a MkIIa, and all I used was cp -ax

didn't need -f since I had cleaned out the destinations previously
same for -u
didn't want -v since I didn't sit by the empeg while copying, and output sometimes can slow down the process... Probably not much of an issue in this case since each file is pretty large and therefor the overhead pretty small...

/Michael