rsync and large files

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 12:11:35PM -0400, Sameer Kamat wrote:
> My question is, I am observing that the data being sent over is almost
> equal to the size of the file. Would an insertion of a few blocks in a
> binary file, move the alignment of the entire file and cause this to
> happen?

That depends on the file and your options.  Is the file compressed?  If
so, all data after the change is radically different, and will not match
(unless you use an rsync-friendly compression algorithm, such as
"gzip --rsyncable").   If that's not the case, are you using --inplace?
(That option specifically mentions that it doesn't handle early
insertions well.)  Or is --whole-file being specified or implied?  (It is
implied by a local transfer, so specify --no-whole-file if you need to
test using a local transfer.)

..wayne..