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Hi, Is there a way in which rsync's -z compression (zlib) utility can be benchmarked? I'm trying to compare the compression ratio between rsync and external compression tools like gzip and bzip2. Are there any advantages to using rsync's internal compression mechanism specified with the -z option compared to solely applying external compression i.e. bzip2 to the files and invoking

I'm interested in these very questions (librsync-rsync relationship, remaining limitations of rsync, active prospects for ground-up rewrites), Google searches for rsync info have proved a little too vague due to the programs ubiquity. Much has certainly changed since this was written, could some people with knowledge in these areas could update martin's response for the state of rsync,

...rsync available, but it only allows to rsync a block device into a regular file. Someone suggested that the --keep-device option be added to rsync for that, but I don't think anyone did implement it. Then I started to look at alternatives including: xdelta, xdelta3, bsdiff, bdiff, bdelta, open-vcdiff. Unfortunately, among those supporting block devices, none were able to "patch" a device without rewriting it fully (which defeats my purpose as I only want the modifications to be written so the qcow2 image grows only as much). Then I decided the best option was to enhance the copy-devi...