What problems does encryption cause with RSYNC?
A. As stated earlier, RSYNC is efficient because it can detect differences between 2 similar files and transfer only the information that is different in the files to keep both files identical. RSYNC does not have a problem with transferring encrypted files, the problem is that the encryption process will scramble the files in such a way that RSYNC will not be able to effectively find common patterns between the files being compared; this limits the effectiveness of RSYNC’s ability to save time and bandwidth while dealing with encrypted files. Generally, RSYNC will resend the entire file each time the process is run against an encrypted file. If you have 20 Megabytes of encrypted files, RSYNC will copy most of the 20 Megabytes during each backup process. The Crypt application for example encrypts the file in its entirety each time it is run against a file. If you have a 100 page document, each time Crypt is run against this file, the entire 100 page document will be re-scrablmed. Even
