rsync & UFO

Christoph Koeberlin

Dear TypeDrawers,
what’s the best practice with rsync and UFOs?
I neither want to wait forever nor zip every single UFO … Any recommendations?
Thanks!
Christoph

Jens Kutilek

What are the options of rsync that you are using? I would play around with some of the options:

--checksum
I guess the checksums to find modified files in an UFO take a while, but maybe it results in a faster transfer than if files that just have a new timestamp, but are identical, are included in the transfer.

--compress
Compressing the files for transfer may or may not be faster than uncompressed files. If each file is compressed on its own, compression may be slower than uncompressed transfer. Not sure how rsync does it.

--whole-file
Transferring whole files may also be faster if there are a lot of small files like in a UFO.

Another idea: If you have rsync access to a server, maybe you have also a login via ssh. Then you could set up a git repository with ssh access. git is quite efficient in optimizing the transfer, and you get version control as a benefit.

Christoph Koeberlin

Danke, Jenser!

I’ll try the rsync options as you suggest (and will report), and also I’ll see if git is an option.

Christoph Koeberlin

Ok, I did some tests with a handy UFO:

rsync -aE

was my initial setting. (-a archive mode, -E copy extended attributes)

rsync -aEz

(-z compress)
did not make any difference.

rsync -aEW

(-W whole-file)
was a bit faster.

I finally ended up with

rsync -aW

leaving away -E copy extended attributes,
which was more than 3 times faster. I guess I don’t need resource forks.

Thanks again!

Roel Nieskens

Is it faster for a sync, or an initial transfer? 

Christoph Koeberlin

Sorry, that wasn’t clear indeed:
Right now it’s about the initial transfer, and therefore I didn’t test the --checksum setting yet. More to come …

Christoph Koeberlin

Update: I tried out git, and it’s fast as a lightning! No rsync any more. Thanks again, Jenser!