rsync: December 2009 Archives

I'm a stickler for backups. I do them all the time. I make more than one copy.

The worst thing about my backups is Thunderbird mail. I POP the mail down to my local computer for various reasons, and if you use Thunderbird this way, you know that it uses the mbox format, which leads to some very large files.

And every time you get an e-mail, those large files change ever so slightly.

I'm using rsync as my backup utility, and backing up the Thunderbird mail always takes a very, very, very long time.

I don't know for sure if I'm invoking the "copy only parts of the file that changed" switch in rsync (I use rsync -av --delete), but whether I am or not, it takes an awfully long time to complete the backup.

It takes so long that I have one script to back up all my user files except Thunderbird mail and another script that does Thunderbird mail only.

All in all, I'd rather have my POP mail saved in a format that creates thousands of small files, most of which never change, rather than a few dozen huge ones that are always changing.