Windows – rsync to Windows with “:” in filenames

There is now an official way to do this in rsync (version 3.1.0 protocol version 31, tested with Ubuntu Trusty 14.04).

#> ./rsync -a --info=progress2 /usr .
    305,002,533  80%   65.69MB/s    0:00:01  xfr#1653, ir-chk=1593/3594)

I tried with my /usr folder because I wanted this feature for transferring whole filesystems, and /usr seemed to be a good representative sample.

The --info=progress2 gives a nice overall percentage, even if it's just a partial value. In fact, my /usr folder is more than 6 gigs:

#> du -sh /usr
6,6G    /usr/

and rsync took a lot of time to scan it all. So almost all the time the percentage I've seen was about 90% completed, but nonetheless it's comforting to see that something is being copied :)

References:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/7272339/1396334
• https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.1.0

What you want to do should be possible with the --relative (or -R) option and a previous run of find to generate a file list:

find /cvs1 -type f -not \( -name *Locks -o -name tmp \) -print0 > filelist
rsync -pR --modify-window=1 -0 \
      --files-from=filelist /mnt/DUBBU01/Linux/Buzz/

Here you create a null-terminated list of files (only files, not directories) and feed this to rsync as the source for it's operation, informing it about the null-termination with -0. This is useful to avoid problems with spaces etc. in file names.

from the rsync man page:

   -R, --relative

Use relative paths. This means that the full path names specified on the command line are sent to the server rather than just the last parts of the filenames. This is particularly useful when you want to send several different directories at the same time. For example, if you used this command:

rsync -av /foo/bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/

... this would create a file named baz.c in /tmp/ on the remote machine. If instead you used

rsync -avR /foo/bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/

then a file named /tmp/foo/bar/baz.c would be created on the remote machine -- the full path name is preserved.