rsync saves me again

Thank you rsync for saving my ass again.

I have an Apple Mac G5 that I use for running my DAW’s and music production. About a year ago I reinstalled the OS from scratch and set the partition type as Case-Sensitive. At the time I thought that was clever because I work in linux all day and linux is case-sensitive. Wow was that a mistake. It is amazing how much case-sensitivity causes headaches on a daily basis. Adobe Photoshop (and most other adobe products) will not install. They require case-insenstive operating systems… (case-insensitive is the default for OSX). Protools, although doesn’t require it, doesn’t seem to work correctly under a case-sensitive OS. Even iTunes has it’s share of issues. Which is where rsync saved the day for me.

In my iTunes library I ended up with a bunch of files that named the same, some with capital letters and some without.  For example, I have a two files in a directory named: “Coheed and Cambria – Welcome Home” and “coheed and cambria – Welcome Home”. How it got like that I will never know but it really made things tough.

Last week I bought a 1TB SATA drive from Fry’s and installed it in the G5. I then moved all my project files and audio files and everything important off of the main hard drive to the new one, which I of coarse formatted as case-insensitive preparing for a fresh install of OSX. Well, when I dropped the iTunes folder on the new drive it started copying only to error when it hit the Coheed directory. Because in a case-sensitive environment there were two Welcome Home files (one with capitals and one without) and in a case-insensitive env they are the same file. Needless to say the finder copy failed and I would have had to wade through 19GB of music to find where this happens and clean it up to move everything over.

Welcome rsync to save the day. I opened up my good ‘ol terminal and popped off an rsync instead:

rsync -av –inplace /Users/heijmans/Music/iTunes /Volumes/MusicDrive/

rsync is able to overwrite the files without caring and TADA! all fixed! Thank you rsync for being so awesome.

Command expaination:

-av –inplace means:

a = archive: copy over everything. (there is more to it but you will need to go read the manual)

v = verbose: show me what you are doing

–inplace = inplace: don’t copy over to a temp file and then compare the source and dest. Just overwrite the dest file inplace. This is handy if you are running an rsync for the first time and there is nothing to compare. It speeds it up a bit.