Rsyncing a very large directory tree (over 50,000 files)

[Jamie Lokier]

Matt McCutchen wrote:
> Yes, rsync will send the complete file list each time it runs.  It seems
> odd to me that building the file list would take 15 minutes; when I back
> up the system partition of my computer (300,000 files) rsync takes
> perhaps 5 minutes to build the file list.

That surely depends on the computer and your disk.

My laptop disk has about 2,000,000 files, and it takes longer than 15
minutes to build the list when doing a backup with rsync.  Also I have
to do two rsync runs, as it can run out of memory if I do the whole
tree with one.  (192MB RAM).

-- Jamie