I have a directory ~/music that contains all my music files and a directory /media/backup/music that I wish to synchronize with the first one using rsync. Initially, I did a rsync -a ~/music /media/backup which created the music directory inside /media/backup with all my music files as expected.
Since then I have modified a lot of filenames inside ~/music and now I want to sync these changes. Doing a rsync -ain seems to register these modifications as new files - and hence it will create a set of new files in the backup directory and not just update the exisiting target filenames. Most of my files are big and I don't want to re-copy them each time they change name.
Is there a way to tell rsync to synchronize identical files with different names by only updating the filenames from the source and not creating new ones? I might use the --delete option to delete extraneous files, but if there's a better way to this I'd like to know.
Example:
$ cd example
$ rsync -a var backup/ # rsync var under backup/var
$ tree .
.
├── backup
│ └── var
│ ├── JSON.gif
│ └── logs
│ ├── xinit.log
│ └── x.log
└── var
├── JSON.gif
└── logs
├── xinit.log
└── x.log
$ mv var/JSON.gif var/JSON-LOGO.gif # rename some file
$ mv var/logs var/log # rename some directory
$ rsync -a var backup/ # sync the changes
$ tree .
.
├── backup
│ └── var
│ ├── JSON.gif # don't want this one
│ ├── JSON-LOGO.gif # want -only- this one
│ ├── log # same here
│ │ ├── xinit.log
│ │ └── x.log
│ └── logs # don't want this one either
│ ├── xinit.log
│ └── x.log
└── var
├── JSON-LOGO.gif
└── log
├── xinit.log
└── x.log
