On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 04:21:20PM -0500, James Pifer wrote: > Reply-To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> > > Quick rsync question. I have a whole bunch of data that I rsync to > another machine for backup purposes. I had to rebuild the primary system > and I copied all the data back to it from the backup. Now when I run the > rsync script it wants to recopy everything, even though it's already > there on both the primary and backup system. > > Are there any options on rsync to tell it to look at what's already > there and figure that out without recopying the whole thing? I looked at > the options and it wasn't obvious to me how to do this. The date time stamps on the 'primary' system are newer so the all the files look 'new'. Look at the eight different ways of using rsync as outlined in the man page. These flags might help --checksum --no-whole-file --ignore-times By way of example: -c, --checksum This forces the sender to checksum all files using a 128-bit MD4 checksum before transfer. The checksum is then explicitly checked on the receiver and any files of the same name which already exist and have the same checksum and size on the receiver are not transferred. This option can be quite slow. Caution... --delete flag can cause people in your situation trouble, but has it's place. --delete delete files that donât exist on sender It is possible to wack a backup with this option. i.e. if you are backing up a gull dir and the contents of the dir get wacked the mirror will too. It WILL synchronize the two ;-) -- T o m M i t c h e l l spam unwanted email. SPAM, good eats, and a trademark of Hormel Foods.