Hi, LQ. This is something that's been bugging me for a few years and I finally decided to ask.

I'm copying data from a backup drive back to the original, and while I did exclude some stuff (like *.iso), there's occasionally some huge file that I missed. For example:

So now I'm annoyed because, while I know rsync won't transfer files twice, it'll still verify all the files that came before. That process could take another ten minutes before it gets back to where I canceled it. It'd be cool if you could just tell it to skip that file and move onto the next one on-the-fly.

I'm curious to see if anyone else has ever had this happen, and if you do anything about it or just bite the bullet and wait.

I would cancel, omit the files you don't want and rsync with -u switch to only copy newer files.

i use the --exclude option with rsync, especially since i don't have a remote location to save my backup, and i don't want to backup the backup folder - which to me sounds like it would create a recursive backup loop until my harddrive is full! the man page can help you out with its usage.