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I'm a fairly new rsync user. I'm trying to understand rsync's creation/use of temporary files.

Situation: I've a hard drive with many directories of images such as

├── [480K]  Pictures/
│   ├── [4.0K]  112007272/
│   │   ├── [ 60K]  image_000.jpg*
│   │   ├── [ 70K]  image_001.jpg*
│   │   ├── [ 70K]  image_002.jpg*
│   │   ├── [ 60K]  image_003.jpg*
...
│   ├── [4.0K]  112007275/
│   │   ├── [ 60K]  image_000.jpg*
│   │   ├── [ 60K]  image_001.jpg*
│   │   ├── [ 50K]  image_002.jpg*

The main directory sits at about 200GB. The hard drive was corrupted, so I need to copy the files over to a backup hard drive.

I used the following command

rsync -br /media/jon/DataA /media/jon/DataB --info=progress2

During the process the new directory DataB sat about 2x the size of the original DataA. When I looked into this, I found that rsync creates some temporary files by default.

However, my concern is that these temp files can get very large (~54M). From what I've seen, they only contain paths to files being copied over. However, there are many files (over a thousand of these temp files).

Is there a better way to handle this situation? This was seriously concerning when my DataB was at 88% full.

Is it just better practice to include the flag --inplace?

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  • huh? why -b ?
    – Jasen
    Mar 17, 2019 at 4:32
  • You can ignore -b. It doesn’t do anything in this case. It’s more redundant than anything.
    – Jon
    Mar 17, 2019 at 17:55

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