[Nottingham] Just how smart is rsync?

[Jason Irwin]

(Summary from various people's emails - really appreciate the input)

>If you can mount the image remotely, and mount your image locally
I can on my Ubuntu box here and I could do that on my old XP box.  On Win7?
HAH!

>How fast is your connection?
Watching the receiver with "iftop"...the transfer is going at 1.33Mb.  The
maths don't look good.  I can't see what compression (if any) "rsync" is
managing to get on ZIP transfer though.

>Rsync is perfectly capable of transferring only the changed portions of a
large file, 
>it's just that compressed files tend to change completely when the files
inside change, 
That's what I was afraid of.

>Oh dear... What? No LiveCD or memory stick to hand? No cygwin even?
The recipient is an Ubuntu 10.10 server (VM image) so no real issue there.
The sender has "Cygwin" with "ssh" and "rsync" installed.

If I'd had time, I would have added a new virtual HDD to take the
uncompressed image, exploded the baseline etc and try to do all the other
good stuff people have suggested (and had the time to bone-up on "rsync"
properly).  I just wasn't 100% sure how it would react to the single ZIP.

However, being told that the image *must* be transferred by tomorrow morning
really doesn't give a newb like me many choices.  So I've had to go for the
"Probably slow, but will definitely work.  Eventually." approach.

Thanks for all the advice, this kind of thing will become more frequent so
hopefully I can use it as a way to create a Linux beachhead.

And I hear Lucifer likes a good snowball fight.

Man I need to get a new job...

J.