rsync huge tar files

[Shachar Shemesh]

Harald Dunkel wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Are there any tricks known to let rsync operate on huge tar
> files?
>
> I've got a local tar file (e.g. 2GByte uncompressed) that is
> rebuilt each night (with just some tiny changes, of course),
> and I would like to update the remote copies of this file
> without extracting the tar files into temporary directories.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>
> Regards
>
> Harri

What distro is this? If it's Debian, gzip has an option called 
"--rsyncable". This makes changes to the uncompressed file local in the 
compressed file.

If this is not a Debian system check maybe the rsyncable patch was 
integrated there too. If not, compile your own version of gzip. In order 
to apply it to the tar file, you will have to not use the "z" option 
while creating the tar, but instead pipe it to gzip. Instead of doing 
"tar czf file.tgz dirs..." you do "tar cf - dirs... | gzip --rsyncable > 
file.tgz"

Enjoy

          Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/