Resume rsync transfers with the --partial switch

This blog post was published 8 years ago and may or may not have aged well. While reading please keep in mind that it may no longer be accurate or even relevant.

Recently I wanted to rsync a 16GB file to a remote server. The ETA was calculated as 23 hours and, as it usually happens, the file transfer aborted after about 20 hours due to a changing dynamic IP address of the modem. I thought: “No problem, I just re-run the rsync command and the file transfer will resume where it left off.” Wrong!

Because, by default, on the remote side, rsync creates a temporary file beginning with a dot, and once aborted during the file transfer, this temporary file is deleted without a trace! Which, in my case, meant that I wasted 20 hours of bandwidth.

It turns out that one can tell rsync to keep temporary files by passing the argument --partial. I tested it, and the temporary file indeed is kept around even after the file transfer aborts prematurely. Then, when simply re-running the same rsync command, the file transfer is resumed.

In my opinion, rsync should adopt this behavior by default. Simple thing to fix, but definitely an argument that should be passed every time!

Added: Simply use -P. This implies --partial and we also get a nice progress output.

If you found a mistake in this blog post, or would like to suggest an improvement to this blog post, please me an e-mail to michael@franzl.name; as subject please use the prefix "Comment to blog post" and append the post title.