up vote 4 down vote favorite

I've created a backup script with rsync and I have it running every 10 minutes. I am copying files from HFS to Fat32. I have it logging using --progress but to make reading the log easier I only want to include files that are transferred. I.e. at the end of a run I would like to see something in the log like:

Started transfer at 2012-07-31 11:03:45

/some/file/that/was/changed.txt
/another/file/that/was/added.jpg

Number of files: 35184
Number of files transferred: 2

I can't find anything after a bit of googling. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks.

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  • 1
    Have you tried using --stats instead of --progress? – scai Jul 31 '12 at 10:36
  • Yeah but it doesn't state which files were transferred. – jeanaux Jul 31 '12 at 11:03
  • 1
    I've noticed that the reason it was listing everything is because I was using the -a flag. I changed it to -tr because I'm rsyncing to fat32 and the other options of -a don't really matter. It seems to only print the progress of transferred files now rather than all of them. I don't know why this works but I suspect that it's because fat32 can't store some aspect of the file (like it does with timestamps) and rsync thinks it needs to be updated a second time when it looks like the file is different. – jeanaux Jul 31 '12 at 11:24
  • @jeanaux Please add more information to your question, such as a simple log, and the fact that your target filesystem is fat32 (using a non-native filesystem is an important piece of information). Then answer your question, ideally mentioning which particular aspect was causing the problem if you can find out. – Gilles Jul 31 '12 at 22:41
up vote 2 down vote accepted

I figured it out in the end. I noticed that the reason it was listing everything was because I was using the -a flag.

I'm syncing to fat32 so something about the -a flag was causing it to try to sync all the files every time.

I changed the flags to -tr and that solved the problem. I don't know what it was about the -a flag that was causing it but I know that fat32 isn't as detailed as other files systems and file comparisons don't always work properly between filesystems as a result.

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  • 1
    -a equals -rlptgoD. In fat32, permissions (-p), owner (-o) and group (-g) probably won't match (they're fixed as mount options for fat32), so rsync will try to update them (as you told it), but will fail everytime. – spuk May 13 '15 at 14:25

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