The recursive switch

[Colin Raven]

Thanks to all for jumping in on this one. I've used rsync in a kind of offhand manner for years, only now was it necessary to "get serious" with it....

So then, using -a **includes** -r? Goodness me, I was using -ra so who knows what gnarliness I was actually causing!!

If I can briefly say what is going on, a 9.4GB dataset changes by about +50 MB per day, and is rsync'd once a day.

If I deliberately run rsync again right after it finished a run with the combo "-rahvz" it ambles through the tree, obligingly lists everything, then - concluding there's nothing to be done, emits a human readable summary and exits. 
Unfortunately this takes a rather long time, and accomplishes (of course) nothing, since there's nothing to sync, but while essentially doing nothing, nevertheless chews up some significant resources.

What is a more intelligent approach?

-C

On Mar 1, 2012, at 20:40, Kevin Korb <kmk at sanitarium.net> wrote:

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> Yes, -a includes -r and a bunch of other things.
> 
> - --no-i-r disables the incremental recursion and forces rsync to hold
> the entire tree in memory in addition to fully scanning the tree on
> both ends before copying anything.
> 
> On 03/01/12 14:39, Elliot Wilen wrote:
>> On Mar 1, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Kevin Korb wrote:
>> 
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>>> Without -r rsync will ignore all directories even if the path
>>> you specified is a directory.  That is what recursive means.
>>> 
>>> If you are having memory usage issues make sure you are running
>>> rsync version 3 on both ends and check that you aren't using any
>>> of the options that conflict with incremental recursion (like
>>> --delete-before).
>> 
>> Which contradicts what I wrote about using --no-i-r. I defer to
>> Kevin.
>> 
>> But again, note that -a includes -r.
>> 
>> 
>> Elliot Wilen Network Administrator/Postmaster Communications and
>> Information Systems MPR Associates, Inc. 2150 Shattuck Ave., Suite
>> 800 Berkeley, CA 94704 Phone: (510) 849-4942 Fax: (510) 849-0794
>> 
>> www.mprinc.com
>> 
> 
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