On 11/21/10 9:02 AM, Michael D. Berger wrote: > On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 06:47:04 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > >> On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Michael D. Berger >> <m_d_berger_1900 at yahoo.com> wrote: > [...] >> >> > From decades of experience in many environments, I can tell you that >> reliable transfer of large files with protocols that require >> uninterrupted transfer is awkward. The larger the file, the larger the >> chance that any interruption at any point between the repository and the >> client will break things, and with a lot of ISP's over-subscribing their >> available bandwidth, such large transfers are, by their nature, >> unreliable. >> >> Consider fragmenting the large file: Bittorrent transfers do this >> automatically: the old "shar" and "split" tools also work well, and >> tools like "rsync" and the lftp "mirror" utility are very good at >> mirroring directories of such split up contents quite efficiently. > > What, then, is the largest file size that you would consider > appropriate? There's no particular limit with rsync since if you use the -P option it will be able to restart a failed transfer with just a little extra time to verify it with a block-checksum transfer. With methods that don't restart, an appropriate size would depend on the reliability and speed of the connections since it relates to the odds of a connection problem during the time it takes to complete the transfer. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com