[AceJohnny2]

That's what I did in my first iteration, except find is hell.

No wait, I mean find is a really powerful and sophisticated tool, but it takes time and effort to get it to do precisely what you want. It turned out rsync did what I wanted more easily.

[4ad]

Find has an atrocious syntax. Nowadays, I seldom use any other feature of find rather than just enumerating files. Rather, I enumerate files, create commands on them (with things like xargs and sed), and pipe the output into sh. Generating code is a very flexible technique, and it's actually easier (and safer) that trying to muck with find options.