having trouble with rsync

[paveway]

For whatever reason, I can not get rsync to work the way it's supposed to. Every time I run the command(tried it with many different options) it copies EVERY SINGLE FILE! This takes way too long and uses up too much bandwidth.

What I'm trying to do is back up my Music folder on my Windows machine to my linux machine (OpenSuse). The problem is, every time I run the command, it copies every single file again, even though none of them have been updated. I have tried it with the -a (archive) option and the -u (update) option.

Any suggestions on what to do?

Thanks yall!

[atreyu]

Are you running rsync from Windows (via rsync.exe, e.g.) or from a samba share within Linux?

Can you post the exact command you have tried?

[Rubberman]

What atreyu said, and also how are you mounting the Windows directory on Linux?

[Irithori]

The thing is: rsync uses multiple attributes to determine if a file is different on source vs destination.
Timestamps, file size, permission bits,..

And as windows and linux have fundamentally different concepts of those attributes,
this might lead to "all files changed, let´s resync them".

The man page of rsync can help you in adjusting the relevant attributes.

[scathefire]

You can also add -z for compression to help save on your bandwidth. Rsync itself spits out an output of all files that are being compared and all that. You should try running rsync with the -n option (or --dry-run). It will tell you what it would have done IF the command actually executed.

The thing to take note of is when it finishes e.g. from a client.

sent 1132289623 bytes  received 38 bytes  514794.12 bytes/sec
total size is 1132151330  speedup is 1.00

So I sent about 1GB of data. My rsync job though maybe quite larger.

Rsync still has to run a delta algorith (i believe that's what its called) to compare the files, so this can take time as well.

It looks at not only file size changes, but timestamps as everyone else has said. You can try -I (or --ignore-times), but this may not have the desired effect you are looking for.

[paveway]

Thanks for the responses yall.

First off, when this is all said and done, I would like for my Linux machine to, every night, back up my music folder on my Windows machine. I also use the Linux machine sort of as a local file server, so yes, Samba is installed and in proper working order.

As for the source and destination, the source is a mounted windows share on the linux machine. I have this share automatically mount upon bootup through fstab. The destination is a directory in home. Now, I do also have my home directory on Linux shared and mounted on windows (for some extra storage space and redundancy).

The command I am running is basically this:

rsync -va --delete --progress /mnt/my_mounted_windows_folder /home/me/MusicBackup

I have altered it a little bit (including taking out the -a option) here and there to no avail...

[atreyu]

have u tried the --size-only rsync option? Have you used --verbose to try and get more output?