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Rsync that handles moves sensibly

16 votes
7 answers
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I've been successfully using **rsync** to synchronize my home directories between my laptop and my netbook (both using ext4 with Linux). My only problem with it is that every now and then I like to completely reorganize certain directories, and **rsync** sees this as deletions and creation of new files, which makes it very slow and inefficient. Does anybody know of a good piece of software that handles file moves well? I've found that **unison** should be capable of this, but it doesn't seem to work in practice. I tested **unison** by synchronizing two local directories, each with a large file in it, and it still detected my move as a deletion+creation and was in effect even slower than **rsync**. Moreover, if I remember correctly from my looking at **unison**'s source code a couple of months ago, it tried to do something like doing sha sums—and I don't want my ideal solution to do sha sums—that's too slow on large files/directories. I'd like something that notices things like: " The last source counterpart of this file seems to have been deleted and there's a new file elsewhere in the source directory tree that has the same mdate, size, and inode number, so I'm just going to assume that this was a move and move its target counterpart accordingly instead of doing a delete+copy. " It's important to me that I be able to sync these machines quickly. Any suggestions?
Asked by Petr Skocik (29590 rep)
Nov 26, 2013, 11:41 AM
Last activity: Jan 30, 2023, 05:35 PM