Summary: Looking for a smooth way to allow rsyncing of mail and news to generate cumulative archives, but cut off a specified date, and begin a new archive that contains nothing of the previouis one. That might have sounded kind of confusing, but here's my setup: I routinely rsync my ~/Mail ~/News (news is downloaded usenet) to cumulative archives so that as expiration/expunge etc occur in ~/Mail ~/News I have the current working(trimmed down) set but also a large archive of everthing since (whenever). /some/archive/Mail /some/archive/News. As you may imagine the archives eventually grow unusably large. I'd like to figure out a cool accurate way to continue this setup but generate a new set of archives (keeping the old) with dated names. /some/Mail/archive_start_DATE ... Trouble is how to sync the current trimmed down set with the new archive, so that none of the messages in current ~/Mail(News) that are already in the previous archive, get rsynced to the new one. So I have a clean break with no duplication. Something similar to the `newer' option to find command would be nice. So that one day I could just tell rsync to move stuff to the new archive but not if its older than DATE. Any ideas how to accomplish this with the least huffing and puffing? I did try some experiments with --compare-dest=DIR but didn't really see how to accomplish the above goal with that.