Incremental Diffs?

Kim Scarborough lists at jinx.unknown.nu
Thu Mar 7 03:58:15 EST 2002


Hello,

I'm new to rsync, and I'm confused about something. I was under the
impression that it used some sort of diff function to save time &
bandwidth when copying over files. I'm using it to backup files from one
computer to another, and it works exactly as I thought it would, except
that it seems to be copying entire files over when they've change rather
than the differences. This is a problem with a few huge mail spools that I
need to back up; even if there's just a couple messages appended to the
end, it copies over the entire file. Here's the command I'm running:

rsync -vvaRbS --backup-dir=/backups/rsync/old --delete --rsh=ssh \
--exclude="*.core" --numeric-ids --stats --progress --bwlimit=100 \
/usr/local /home /var/mail remotehost:/backups/rsync/current

Am I missing something here? Does one of these options imply "-W"?

Possibly relevant: I'm running rsync 2.5.2 client-side but 2.5.3pre1
server-side. 2.5.2 kept coredumping on the server for some reason. I would
have investigated further had 2.5.3pre1 not fixed it. Both boxes are
FreeBSD 4.5.

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Kim Scarborough                                      http://www.unknown.nu/kim/
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"I have to applaud whoever thought of making a big hot dog shaped car, and
then made that vision a reality"
                                                                 - Chris Scales
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