great feature idea (well, hopefully)

[QUBE RUBBIK]

Hello

I was just thinking about a killer feature for rsync, the ability to detect files name changes or move within the source and destination.
At this time rsync has to re-transfer a file if it has been renamed or moved inside a subfolder, with a heavy waste of ressources and bandwidth.

It could be smarter :
with a --smart switch, rsync could take a hash of every file within the source and destination BEFORE TRANSFERING, 
then for existing (matching hash) files, it only needs to alter metadata (name, location, chmod etc...) saving plenty of bandwidth

Okay destination has to handle this, I expect the rsync daemon has to handle server side file hashing.

We would have a clever tool to replicate data who only been reorganised with no changes on the files themselves.
No need to resync the whole structure if you added a dir in the path, or someone renamed this particular heavy file

this may save big data on automatic backups, ftp mirrors etc...


What do you think about it?

--smart ?
 		 	   		  
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