Confirming Copy Worked Ok and Correctly
 

Rather paranoid question here, but I'm moving my backup drive onto a larger disk and therefore need to verify that all my backups are correct after being copied. I'd like to md5sum every file or something to confirm they're correct, but with thousands of files it's just impossible.

My solution would be to .tar the backup and MD5sum the archive, but I don't have enough hard disk space to be able to do that.

Is there a way I can ask the computer to verify the copy is a true copy?

Thanks

rsync can do that for you

Would this be the expected command?

rsync automatically checks the result, it has its own checksum, you can try --dry-run to check what will the command try to do.