[CentOS] unison versus rsync

Thu Jan 14 00:11:56 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 1/13/2010 5:54 PM, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
> Anyone got any actual comparisons between unison and rsync specifically related
> to the performance of synchronization of large data sets over slow links?
>
> I have a huge tree to start replication of Friday and know that if I sync the root
> paths it will take ages and with the lack of any overall state of progress this won't
> be optimal as its likely to fail for whatever reason before it can finish. Initially
> I just thought I would break it down to several smaller jobs but that becomes a burden
> to maintain...
>
> We use bacula internally  but sending the diffs would be cumbersome as the individual
> files would be rather large...

I didn't think unison was maintained any more - and I wouldn't expect 
anything to beat rsync with the -z option on a slow link.  I'd just use 
the -P option and restart it when/if it fails.  It wouldn't hurt to do 
subsets first since they will be quickly skipped when you repeat from 
the root.  If you have a huge number of files it might be worth finding 
a way to update rsync to a 3.x version which will not need to xfer the 
entire directory listing before starting.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com