Does RSYNC work over NFS?

[David Bolen]

tim.conway at philips.com [tim.conway at philips.com] writes:

> yes, but I recommend you add the -W option, unless it's likely that
> you have a lot data changing within the files and a slow pipe.

I wouldn't even put any caveat on it.  Since rsync is going to have to
read the entire file anyway just to compute the block checksums
necessary for its algorithm, you're assured that the entire file will
flow across the NFS link no matter how much changed.  So it really
only makes sense to use -W and just copy the whole thing in the first
place.

To be honest, the only thing rsync offers over a straight copy over
NFS is the recursive comparison of timestamp/size to determine files
to copy.  That might still be worth it, but you're definitely not
going to get any benefit in terms of any delta computation.

-- David

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