Incremental backups and efficiency (continued)

[barkofdelight]

So...

• Can anyone say if copy --no-traverse is appropriate for my situation?
• Are there any minuses to using this flag?
• [Bonus question] Is this the default behavior for copy ? If not, why not?

Since nobody has yet answered these questions I decided to do a test myself locally. My tests showed that the --no-traverse flag did what I wanted (and was not the default behavior), and the performance was excellent. So thanks again, @Ciantic, for bringing this to my attention.

As to the remaining questions, well I lack the expertise to address them. I cannot think of any minus to using this flag in the case of copy, but I guess time will tell! Given that it's not the default, I am guessing there is some subtle drawback. I did find a comment from 2016 https://forum.rclone.org/t/what-are-disadvantages-of-using-no-traverse-with-large-nr-of-files/562:

What are disadvantages of using --no-traverse with large nr of files

If you have lots of files in the source, then you shouldn't use --no-traverse.

rclone can generally list a whole remote using a small number of API calls.

When you are using --no-traverse rclone will do a list API call for each file you upload.

When increasing the number of files you are copying, at some point --no-traverse will become less efficient.

In general if the source is more or less identical to the destination then definitely don't use --no-traverse.

But deciding "more or less identical" is kind of hard to automate.

Thanks,

K.