rsync -

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 09:47 -0400, Bob Goodwin wrote:
> If I tried to rsync the larger file with the smaller it simply 
> replaced the larger file and I lost information.

The first sentence in rsync(1) is: "Rsync  is  a  fast and
extraordinarily versatile file *copying* tool." (my emphasis). Perhaps
you were mislead by the name. The "synchronization" is at the level of
sets of files, i.e. it is not comparable with synch tools such as SyncML
which synchronize records (such as contact info) between distributed
databases.

Rsync compares file modification times and overwrites the older file
with the newer. It does this by computing a minimum set of
block-by-block updates. At no time does it try to understand the
contents of the files.

poc