| I cannot see the original comment as it was deleted, but it seems very weird. There are indeed a lot of Linux/UNIX programs that lose metadata when copying or archiving files, like losing extended file attributes or the high-resolution timestamps with nanosecond resolution. The filesystems that I use (XFS on Linux and UFS on FreeBSD) have timestamps with nanosecond resolution and also extended file attributes, so I was also annoyed in the past when discovering the many utilities that lose metadata. However, rsync is one of the few utilities that preserve all metadata even when copying between distinct file systems, e.g. between UFS and XFS. That is why for many years I have never used anything else except rsync over ssh, to be sure that the metadata is intact. However, to preserve metadata no Linux utility may be used with default options. For instance, I alias rsync to '/usr/bin/rsync --archive --xattrs --acls --hard-links --progress --rsh="ssh -p XXX -l YYYY"' Therefore I wonder on which filesystem the previous poster has seen that rsync loses metadata, because this does not match my experience. In the past, I have also patched some open-source programs to preserve the high-resolution timestamps, but rsync was OK since the beginning. |