Wednesday 9 January 2008 — This is nearly 17 years old. Be careful.
I have a Western Digital 250Gb Passport drive for backing up my Windows laptop. I figured I would just use cygwin rsync to move data between the two drives. When I mount the Passport as drive Q, I use a command like this:
rsync -az --progress . /cygdrive/q/bak
This faithfully copies all the data, and avoids copying stuff that hasn’t changed, mostly. But some files are copied every time I run the command, even when they haven’t been changed, and in fact, a diff program shows that the source and the backup copy are identical. I figure it’s some Windows characteristic of the file that is throwing off rsync and making it think the file needs to be copied, but I can’t figure out what. Some of the files have capital letters in the filename, but not all of the afflicted files do. I never set permissions on files, so I don’t think that could be it (but I could be wrong).
Anyone have any experience with this?
Comments
I think you might be better off with something like SyncToy.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx
--size-only --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from=exclude.txt -avz --no-group
although this grew over time, so some options might actually be redundant. I'd look at the man pages and search for no-group and --size-only particularly, to see if they are what you're looking for.
good luck,
eric
The --modify-window suggestion led me to this page which has a number of suggestions that seem helpful.
The other problem is that FAT32 loses ownership permissons. The -a switch is equivalent to -rltpgoD, where the o and g tell rsync to check owners and groups. Try rsync -rltpD (that's what I use for backups on my FAT32 laptop).
Also, the z switch is most useful across the wire, not disk to disk, and is probably just wasting cycles if you're backing up a lot of compressed data and media (which is usually what's taking up the most space, anyway).
-c
Adam
these tips were very useful to me.
My 2 cents below:
I was trying to sync my homedir with a pendrive (fat32), kubuntu 7.10.
To solve the problem I have to:
1) manually remount the pendrive with option shortname=mixed (default is lower).
2) --modify-window=2
3) remove the --perms option, actually I'm using -rltODvz
If I have timezone trouble, I'd use --modify-window=3600 or even 7200 I presume?
I use rsync between windows XP and a wonderful NAS box called a Netgear NV+ (now I think replaced by a ?? Pro or something like that). If you can afford close to $1K for your small biz or family backups, it is really really nice! Even has telnet shell option.
For windows rsync (over wan), i use yintersync http://www.yinter.net.
Thanks a lot.
Sync the entire profile for USERNAME to the /backup folder on the Pi. You can modify that source path to just about anything.
The --bwlimit flag is limiting the bandwidth used by rsync so you don't overwhelm your connection.
The exclusions on AppData are to prevent cyclical symlink transfers.
The timeout is specifying a delay in seconds before running the next command.
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