cp to an offsite archive

[Mike Blatsos]

We currently copy our oracle archive logs to an nfs mount every 5 minutes (very fancy perl script), which takes more resources and time than necessary. I am looking for an easy way to copy files ignoring those that have already been copied before?

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

rdist is the command you want. It will only copy the new or changed files. man rdist

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You might also want to take a look at rsync.

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Networking/Admin/rsync-2.6.8/

It's a bit smarter than rdist in that it can also simply send changed blocks rather than the entire file although for archive logs this is not a good fit.