OT: syncing

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 01:17:04PM -0500, Payal Rathod wrote:
> I have a client uploading a few designs (25-30 Mbs) daily at a remote
> ftp server. [...] I don't want to download partially uploaded files
> (we pay per mb).

The best thing to do when transferring files via ftp is to use the idiom
of uploading to one directory and moving the file into another directory
at the end of the transfer.  This way the destination directory only
gets completed files.  This can be done via many ftp tools, such as
lftp using a script file.  If you don't want to add a separate
directory, you could use an upload naming idiom instead, renaming the
file at the end of the transfer.  Then, you would just have to exclude
any file that matches the temp-file naming rule.  Finally, it may not
hurt that much to download a partial file as long as you re-copy over
the same files later on -- that would let rsync continue to copy a
file that was still being updated with only a slight penalty in total
bandwidth (it would need to transfer the checksums from the receiver to
the sender for any file that was being continued).

..wayne..