On Thu, 9 May 2013, Michael Moore wrote:

>> With rsync, is it possible for the process to be killed so that not all 
>> of the files are copied over?  I still like the idea of confirming that 
>> the files were correctly copied.
>
> Yes, but you can re-run it and it'll only copy the remaining differences 
> over. You can also make it verbose (-v, --verbose) and make it show 
> progress (--progress) as it goes so you can see what's going on

Right, but having it look for remaining differences is functionally the 
same thing is doing something like md5sums, but doing them on both 
machines.  If you have 300 GB of files that's doing a lot of extra work. 
If you make the md5sums on one machine, then copy them to the other 
machine to check there, you don't have to compute them over again.

Also, rsync will just check date stamps and file sizes, not checksums 
unless you tell it to do so -- I think there's a way to tell it to do so.

FYI -- I don't want to lose the point of what I was doing, which was using 
the file transfer thing as an example to illustrate the use of find with 
-print0 and xargs with -0.  There are a lot of other things that can be 
done with that tactic.

Mike