Change one file, and they all get sent!

Steve Howie showie at uoguelph.ca
Sat Dec 13 06:44:24 EST 2003


Wayne Davison wrote:

>On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 11:49:26AM -0500, Steve Howie wrote:
>  
>
>>rsync --progress --recursive --links --stats arthur::test/ /var/tmp/haggis
>>    
>>
>
>You didn't use -t to tell it to preserve the file times.  Without that,
>you must use -c to checksum the files to figure out if they need to be
>resent or not (which is much slower than just using -t).
>
>..wayne..
>  
>
Many thanks Wayne - that was in fact the problem. When I think about it, 
apart from doing a checksum on all the files, the only way to see which 
ones have changed is to examine the timestamps.

We are planning to use rsync as  a faster version of     'tar cvf - | 
tar xvf - '  or rcp to transfer a WebCT file system between machines - 
these file systems are notoriously hard to copy because of their 'flat 
file database'  architecture, characteriszed by *millions* of tiny 
bitmap files. The system spends most of its time opening and closing 
these files rather than actually sending data. Has anyone had experience 
of the elapsed time file transfer improvements  rsync would afford the 
beleagured sysadmin with a file system having such a large number of 
tiny files?

Another nice feature of rsync is the option of NOT having to following 
symlinks - rcp forces you to follow them.

Thanks again!

Scotty



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