more cloning questions

i'm going to attempt to clone my players using this:
http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/car/cloning.html
i'm wondering if it will overwrite all my files on the empeg i am cloning too. i don't want it to duplicate songs i already have on it.

the instructions say to "delete the existing database"...does this mean it will erase all of my files?

thanks.

Deleting the database does nothing to your existing tunes - it would be rebuilt on the next sync based on the tags info contained in the *1 files.

But the process of tarring up the files on the 'source' player and netcatting them to the target player and then untarring them on the target player would overwrite any existing tunes on the target player with a fid that exists on the source player. Since the fids are assigned essentally sequentially (IIRC) - you're likely to nuke everything that exists on the target. Only thing that would survive would be tunes with fids not existing on the source, and they'd probably be orphaned since the root playlist will be nuked...

Don't use this procedure unless you have the tunes on the target backed up!

/Michael