Dag Ringdal wrote:
> hi,
>
> I'm fairly new to rsync, but I'm up and going with the program. I have
> mounted a windows catalogue tree on my linux box. I run the command for
> backup like this:
>
> #rsync -rtv --progress --size-only --delete /source/folder /target/folder
>
> The first time I ran the command, all the files were properly copied to the
> target folder. The next time I ran the command, it seems from the time
> consumed, that the files were copied once more. It took several hours to do
> the second backup. I thought rsync only copied the files which were changed.
> Should I have an -a in the line, or is it just like this rsync works?
>
Rsync will only update the differences when it works as expected.


I don't know exactly how to do this since I don't use windows myself,
but I know it's a big problem with timestamps windows<->linux/unix.

Windows use localtime for everything, while linux use utc based times,
where the correct localtime is displayed for you depending on your TZ.
And in some cases TZ can be different at src <-> dest
So if I from Sweden rsync a file with date 2006-09-25 22:58 to Japan ,
they will see the date as 2006-09-26 05:58 , this is a big difference
compared with windows.

I was sure the --size-only option should skip checking timestamps when
finding candidates for update, but that was maybe wrong.

Here is omething I found on the net:
"
Some "gotchas" in working with rsync under Windows

1. Include/Exclude file lists
On windows, your --exclude-from or --include-from file must be in
Unix format (newlines rather that cr/lf). Put a dos2ux line in your
rsync script to ensure this.


2. Timestamps
Windows doesn't keep file modification times to better than two
seconds. Use the --modify-window=2 option to get around this.


3. Time zones
rsync tries to convert all file timestamps into UTC at both ends.
If seemingly identical files with the same timestamp seem to be
transferring, try this at both ends:
export TZ=UTC
ls -l --full-time file_in_question
If the remote and local files have the same timestamp, and they're
still transferring, then you have a different problem. Otherwise, try
--modify-window=3601 which means ignore time differences of less than an
hour. This can be very helpful after a daylight savings time change.
"


/birger