Hi

Is it possible to compress destination to one gzip file with rsync.
I'm trying to backup source dir /var/log to destination that will be backup.gz file?

Can Rsync compare content of gz archive with src dir content, and if content differ to update gz archive, or create new one with files that differ?
In gzip manual there is a switch command --rsyncable that should make gzip archive much compatible with rsync, but I do not know how it works with rsync.


thanks for your replys

No, rsync does just that: remote synchronizing. It doesn't compress data permanently (it does during transfer, but I couldn't find anything about the algorithm used). However, what you want can be achieved using pipes: you send the output of one command to be used as input of the second command. In your case:Note that | is *not* a lowercase L or capital i, but a special character, usually found on the \ key.

this will make only gzip-ed archive from source-dir, but afterwards it cannot be compared with source dir.

for example in usual rsync case (dir ---> dir)

rsync -a /sourcedir/data /destinationdir/backupdata
* this makes two eqauls dirs

but how it is possible to compare something like this:

rsync -a /sourcedir/data /destinationdir/backupdata.gz
* offcourse this command doesn't work. But is it possible somehow to compare content of gzip archive with /sourcedir/data and if differ to update archive, or create new one.


thanks

I doubt it can be done directly, but using a script it can be done.
1) create a temp dir in /home/user
2) copy the tarred archive back from the backup-machine and unpack
3) compare the unpacked archive with the original file
4) if changed, gzip the original and send it to the backup-machine, else: end script

Another option is to gzip the original and then rsync those. Quicker, but I'm not sure it'll work reading the contents of the archive.