Faster rsync?

Eliot Moss moss@cs.umass.edu
Tue Aug 29 13:43:30 GMT 2023


On 8/29/2023 9:17 AM, Mario Emmenlauer via Cygwin wrote:
> On 29.08.23 14:32, Adam Kessel via Cygwin wrote:
>> I've found rsync to be painfully slow on large folders -- hours to sync thousands of files, even 
>> when they already match size and --size-only is used. It's much faster between native Linux boxes.

I've been told (on this list) that how you mount the Windows drive in Cygwin matters.

I use this in my /etc/fstab:

d:/ /cygdrive/d ntfs binary,posix=0,user,auto,notexec 0 0

Unfortunately, it's still not as quick as I think it ought to be.
(If someone out there can recommend better settings, I'm open!)

I regularly rsync a collection of hundreds of files, each about 2Gb in size.

Windows describes the partition as an NTFS Basic Data Partition.  It takes
rsync a long time to get started (i.e., to figure out which files need
transferring).

My rsync uses these flags:

rsync -avuP --partial --partial-dir=.rsync-partial --log-file=... --log-file-format=...

> I've been using rsync, unison and similar tools on Windows and Linux since basically forever. In my 
> humble opinion, the problem is the Windows file system performance, not the synchronization tools. 
> As a separate example, try to download the boost source code, and extract the archive. I can do the 
> extraction in way under a minute on Linux, but have to wait many many minutes on a similarly 
> equipped Windows machine.
> 
> Just my two cents.
> 
>      Mario
> 

Regards - Eliot Moss


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