rsync: difference between --size-only and --ignore-times
I'm trying to understand what the difference is between two options
rsync --size-only
and
rsync --ignore-times
It is my understanding that by default rsync will compare both the timestamps and the file sizes in order to decide whether or not a file should be synchronized or not. The options above allow the user to influence this behavior.
Both options seem, at least verbally to result in the same thing: comparing by size only.
Am I missing something subtle here?
Answer
There are several ways rsync compares files -- the authoritative source is the rsync algorithm description: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/cas/tridgell96.pdf. The wikipedia article on rsync is also very good.
For local files, rsync compares metadata and if it looks like it doesn't need to copy the file because size and timestamp match between source and destination it doesn't look further. If they don't match, it cp's the file. However, what if the metadata do match but files aren't actually the same? Then rsync probably didn't do what you intended.
Files that are the same size may still have changed. One simple example is a text file where you correct a typo -- like changing "teh" to "the". The file size is the same, but the corrected file will have a newer timestamp. --size-only says "don't look at the time; if size matches assume files match", which would be the wrong choice in this case.
On the other hand, suppose you accidentally did a big cp -r A B yesterday, but you forgot to preserve the time stamps, and now you want to do the operation in reverse rsync B A. All those files you cp'ed have yesterday's time stamp, even though they weren't really modified yesterday, and rsync will by default end up copying all those files, and updating the timestamp to yesterday too. --size-only may be your friend in this case (modulo the example above).
--ignore-times says to compare the files regardless of whether the files have the same modify time. Consider the typo example above, but then not only did you correct the typo but you used touch to make the corrected file have the same modify time as the original file -- let's just say you're sneaky that way. Well --ignore-times will do a diff of the files even though the size and time match.