rsync grr...

From man rsync:

In particular, when transferring to Windows FAT filesystems which cannot
 represent times with a 1 second resolution --modify-window=1 is useful.

So in summary, rsync is pretty close to COMPLETELY USELESS when the destination is a FAT filesystem... UNLESS you find this little note hidden in the man page and do --modify-window=1.

Well at least it's working now. And I'm not copying 180G to my poor usb drive each time I run rsync. So anyway, here is my solution for backing up my Macbook with rsync...

#!/bin/sh

START=`date`
SOURCE=/Users/Simon
DEST=/Volumes/SEAGATE/Backup/Users

rsync -av \
    --delete \
    --delete-excluded \
    --modify-window=1 \
    --exclude '.Trash/*' \
    --exclude 'Downloads/*' \
    --exclude 'Torrents/*' \
    --exclude 'Library/Caches/*' \
    $SOURCE $DEST

END=`date`

echo Started $START
echo Ended $END

Disclaimer: This is very basic and I don't know much about rsync or Mac OS X. Please Google rsync backup for more expert advice.

To the rsync developers, I get it, I'm a big fat luser for using FAT. But do you think just maybe rsync could just possibly notice this condition and deal with it automatically? Perhaps even with a big warning, "WARNING, destination filesystem is FAT, automatically enabling --modify-window=1, please see man page". Maybe then I would have been asleep two hours ago which would have been very, very nice.