rsync to fat32 on different platforms

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 11:38 +0100, Andreas Nef wrote:
> I have a dozen of external usb disks which should be kept in sync with  
> a central rsync server.
> As I can't predict which OS they will be used with they are formatted  
> with fat32. If I use them with either Linux (ubuntu) or OS X rsync  
> works without problems. However, when I try the syncing with the hd  
> attached to a windows pc the rsync process (using cygwin) will take  
> close to 40 minutes only check what needs to be updated. Does anybody  
> know what could be the cause for this strange behaviour? Is it  
> something with permissions (parameters I used for initial creation of  
> the copy were "-rtluvz --modify-window=1")? Or are there compatibility  
> issues with rsync/cygwin?

Cygwin might just be slow, or there might genuinely be something strange
going on.  Increase the verbosity to -vvv to find out more about what is
taking so long.  Also, you may wish to use rsync >= 3.0.0 on the Windows
machine to get the speed benefit of incremental recursion, if you aren't
already doing so.

-- 
Matt