detect file moves and renames with rsync

06 Aug 2014

I use rsync to backup my $HOME directory everyday with something like this:

$ sudo rsync -az --one-file-system --delete $HOME/ admin@backup.javier.io:~/backup/$(hostname)

Most of the times it takes me less than 10 minutes at 2MB/s to re-sync everything, however last weekend it took almost 20 hours! so while I was waiting I decided to take a look to see what was happening. It turned out rsync was re-uploading some pretty heavy files because I had renamed them locally. I couldn’t believe rsync was so dumb, I was shocked O_O

So I went to Internet and looked for solutions, fortunatelly some other guys had found this problem before and created a couple of patches:

These patches add the following options:

Since I’m not the kind of person who enjoys spending their time compiling software I packaged a modified rsync version for supported Ubuntu LTS versions and upload it somewhere, while doing it I updated the patches to make them compile with the latest rsync version (at the moment of writing this version 3.1.1).

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:minos-archive/main
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install rsync

In my personal tests the modified rsync shows an amazing speed up for uploads who involve renamed/moved files, so I’m installing this in all my computers.

Note: For this to work, both, server and client must have installed the modified rsync version

Happy uploading 😋

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