[OT] - Backing Up Windows XP to Linux

[Bart Whiteley]

On 10/4/06, Michael L Torrie <torriem at chem.byu.edu> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 15:12 -0400, brianhks at activeclickweb.com wrote:
> > This is bad.  If you mount the drive you may as well use cp or copy or
> > xcopy.  The real strength of rsync is its extremely low level of
> > network traffic to sync the data.  To do this rsync does checksums on
> > the data so if you run it over a mounted volume it will read all of
> > the date across the wire.  Rsync runs best when there are two
> > instances of rsync running, one on each machine to be synchronized.
> > This way only checksums are passed over the wire before any data is
> > copied.
>
> I've heard this before, but I don't think it's true, based on my
> experience.  I can rsync between two disks physically in my system and
> it doesn't read much data at all off the local disk except to copy new
> files.  If what you're saying is true about how rsync works, then it
> wouldn't work at all for local rsyncs (wouldn't save time).  I think
> rsync only checksums if it has to.  Could someone who is an rsync expert
> clarify this for me?


Man page indicates that rsync uses file size and mod-time by default.
Force checksums instead with -c.