Incremental help

[Wayne Davison]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 07:17:19PM +0100, Banana Flex wrote:
> i would like to get a backup folder with all modified files on it,  
> not the full backup, only modified files
> i'll tried -b --backup-dir but isn't working

You didn't mention if your problem is that you're seeing backups of
(what should be) unchanged files, or if you don't wish to see backups of
deleted files.

Seeing too many copied files requires you to first figure out why rsync
is updating the files.  If you have omitted the --times (-t or even -a)
option, include it.  If --times is already included and too many files
are being updated, that may be caused by a Mac-specific bug due to their
extended-attributes code (at a guess).  If your rsync is new enough,
using the --itemize (-i) option will show you what rsync thinks is
different about the files it is updating.

If you wish to avoid having deleted files in your backups, there are a
couple options.  One is to switch over to doing a copy into a brand new
directory each day using one or more --compare-dest options (or perhaps
--link-dest) to avoid copying unchanged files (though that may give you
copies of files with changed attributes, which may not be what you
want).  Another solution is to run two rsync commands, the first to copy
the files (with backup) without any deleting, and the second to delete
without any doing any copying -- do this by using --existing with
--ignore-non-existing to avoid all copying (this only creates backups
of files with changed data, not with changed permissions).

..wayne..