All I am having a problem with rsyncing 2 directories in my network. Here is the situation: 1. I have a directory tree on the 1 server say: SOURCE 2. I have to rsync this directory tree on a backup server, say: Backup 3. This is a huge tree (about 8-9 GB) that grows by about 2-3 % a day. 4. What I did is... I gzipped the tree on a HD and restored it on the backup server 5. The file permissions and ownerships are the same on both the machines. 6. Now I run the rsync command like so on the BACKUP server: rsync -ave ssh myuser@SOURCE:/var/SOURCE/ /backups/SOURCE/ This command results in the entire 8 GB tree to be backed up. I want only the incremental files to be rsynced over. I have checked the files on both the machines they seem to be the same (even rsynced individual files and checked MD5SUM and they are the same). Even then it tires to rsync the entire directory tree! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. KS
By default, rsync decides it can skip transferring the data from a source file to a destination file if the files have the same size and last-modified time. Did you preserve last-modified times when you extracted the files onto the backup machine? If you used tar, the times should have been preserved by default. If not, there are two ways you can fix the problem. Extract the archive again on the server, preserving modification times. Or, if you're pretty sure that none of the files have changed on the source machine, run rsync once with the "--size-only" option, which will make it conclude all the files match and change the times at the destination to match the source. Future transfers would see the matching times and skip unchanged files. -- Matt McCutchen, ``hashproduct'' hashproduct@verizon.net -- http://mysite.verizon.net/hashproduct/