rsync - file gathering

[Matt McCutchen]

On 11/27/06, Paul Slootman <paul at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon 27 Nov 2006, Andrés Moré wrote:
> > I would like to know if there's an easy way of telling rsync to remember
> > files and directories when doing "rsync -avzP host:dir ."
> > I need to get in sync more that 600k files, and the gathering procedure
> > takes a lot.
>
> The --files-from= option may help.

Andrés,

The file gathering delay is a well-known disadvantage of rsync, and
there's no easy way around it.  Sorry.  --files-from might eliminate
directory reading, but it won't eliminate statting, so I doubt it will
help much.  Nick Katsamas requested the feature of "remembering" the
file list a long time ago:
    https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2131

Matt