Re: [BackupPC-users] Incremental backups with rsync

[Marty <ma...@ix...>]

Keith Edmunds wrote:
> So are we saying that for an rsync incremental backup, we really expect
> rsync to examine every file on the client? That does seem odd to me.
> 
> Keith
> 
>> My understanding is that when BackupPC is doing an incremental backup via
>> rsync, only the files that have changed attributes since the last full
>> backup are examined.

That's only true if rsync checksumming is not enabled.

>> 
>> I have a backup running on a client that has just over 100,000 files
>> using 24Gb, and monitoring with 'watch lsof -c rsync' shows that
>> apparently every file on the client system is being checked.

rsync has an option (-c) to enable checksumming.  See its man page.  I assume 
it's configurable in backuppc.