TIL rsync's best checksum is md5. This means that if you're conducting a supply chain attack on a system which uses rsync to keep the mirrors in sync, you could pollute the mirrors w/ bad copies that collide w/ md5 and even rsync --checksum wouldn't know they were modified.
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It also does the entire thing in advance and it entirely blocks progress on uploading while calculating all the checksums. It's very impractical for syncing incremental changes to a very large overall amount of data. It's a lot more than just not being parallel / async.
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I find rsync very impractical with checksums enabled. For large amounts of data, you need to use -t and rely on the last modified date + size checks to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time. Can use checksum mode as an integrity check but probably not for regular usage.
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It could start syncing changed directory/file structure and files with a mismatched modification date or time right away. For everything else, it could be calculating those checksums in a thread pool. It's not good at actually using the available network, CPU and I/O resources.
Some people may want to minimize network usage but I'm used to using OVH where bandwidth is entirely unmetered / unlimited for nearly everything. I simply want it to go as fast as possible. I'd rather have it uploading data opportunistically while it's calculating hashes too...
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If properly threaded, it really shouldn't take very long to figure out what's out of sync, needing to be sync'd up.
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Yep, why I miss cvsup, and wish there was a CLI version of it still around (along w/ the magic to make it work over ssh).