CODEWITHSUNDEEP
filesystemsrsyncfat32
Spacemoose
Spacemoose

Reputation: 4016

rsync on fat32 and ntfs

A little background: I have tried to use rsync to backup my wife's home directory to an external usb drive with the command 

rsync -va /home/wife /run/media/wife

but kept getting error messages that mkstemp failed, and that rsync failed to set times, becuase of a read-only filesystem. Worse, it seems that rsync is unable to tell when files don't need syncing, and winds up copying a lot of stuff it doesn't need to, resulting in rediculously slow backup times.

So I tried using rsync -rtvO instead, based on this guy's advice. Okay, no more warnings, but the backups still seem too slow, and esp on big media files that already exists -- i.e. it's still copying stuff unnecessarily.

  1. Is my analysis correct?
  2. Is there a workaround?
  3. Will the problem be fixed if I use an NTFS drive for here backups?

I could of course use a linux filesytem, but on rare occasions she would like to be able to take the drive to work and access it from the Windows machines there.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4119

Answers (1)

bmaupin
bmaupin

Reputation: 16015

  1. Try using --modify-window=1

    In particular, when transferring to or from an MS Windows FAT filesystem (which represents times with a 2-second resolution), --modify-window=1 is useful (allowing times to differ by up to 1 second).

    https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/rsync.html

  2. You could also try using --size-only

    skip files that match in size

For rsync to FAT, this is what I use and it seems to work pretty well:

rsync -rtv --modify-window=1 source/ destination/

Source: https://serverfault.com/a/144475/58568

Upvotes: 10

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