Deleting modified files

[Matt McCutchen]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 22:21 +0100, Thomas Poindessous wrote:
> I'm trying to do a backup of several servers which are almost  
> identical. I want to have a "base" directory and one directory by  
> server.
> 
> The base directory will have only the files which are identical on all  
> the servers, and each server directory will have all of  the other  
> files which are not in base directory.

Do you need to be able to look at the backup and see which files are
identical and different, or are you just trying to save space?  In the
second case, it would be much easier to use a full directory for each
server and use --link-dest to hard-link identical corresponding files
among these directories.

> I also have a problem with --compare-dest and --checksum because  
> sometimes files are identical on each server but they have different  
> modification time.

Please be more specific about what the problem is.  Do you consider
modification times to be significant?  If so, use -t; rsync will
preserve the times, and they will disqualify --compare-dest omissions
and --link-dest links.  If not, use --checksum and do not use -t, and
rsync won't deal with times at all.  (Rsync does not provide a way to
get the preservation without the disqualification, unless you want to
use multiple runs.)

Matt