--delete not working - due to 200+G of files?

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 04:01:29PM -0500, Eric Praetzel wrote:
> ssh Solaris_box "cd /home;rsync -az --force --delete * Centos_Box::remote_mach"
> ssh Solaris_box "rsync -az --force --delete /home Centos_Box::remote_mach"

Those are two very different things -- the first copies items from
inside the /home dir (and usually only non-dot names), and the latter
copies the /home directory itself, which will put all the copied items
an extra level deep (you probably wanted a trailing slash after /home).

> In all cases rsyncing the original file system copies all files; but files
> and directories removed are not reliably removed from the rsync mirror.

See the manpage for why you should never use a wild-card with delete
(use '.' instead).

> It takes around 4 hours to build a file list - blech!

Rsync 3.0.0 (in pre-release testing) doesn't have this problem due to
its incremental recursion algorithm.

..wayne..