I was not aware of the --partial option until today. It sounded appealing, but after testing it, I'm not sure if I can make good use of it. I killed a big file half way through transfer: $ rsync -av --partial --progress BIGFILE . sending incremental file list BIGFILE 3,629,744,128 50% 106.53MB/s 0:00:32 ^C rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at rsync.c(644) [sender=3.1.2] rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at io.c(513) [generator=3.1.2] Then I completed it using --append (which does not test like it used to before version 3.0), but the file was different. The difference turned out to be in the last 256KB of the first part of the transfer, just before the append. Everything else was fine. So, obviously, I need to use the verification when using appened. I tried again, killing the job midway as before, then I did this: $ rsync -av --append-verify --progress BIGFILE . sending incremental file list BIGFILE 7,175,385,088 100% 158.88MB/s 0:00:43 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1) WARNING: BIGFILE failed verification -- update retained (will try again). BIGFILE 7,175,385,088 100% 251.69MB/s 0:00:27 (xfr#2, to-chk=0/1) sent 3,461,803,040 bytes received 1,694,498 bytes 39,582,829.01 bytes/sec total size is 7,175,385,088 speedup is 2.07 As you can see, it caught the problem, then it fixed it, but this took 70 seconds, plus about 19 seconds in between the two transfers for a total of 89 seconds. But transferring the whole file takes only 56 seconds: $ rsync -av --progress BIGFILE . sending incremental file list BIGFILE 7,175,385,088 100% 120.51MB/s 0:00:56 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1) sent 7,177,137,019 bytes received 35 bytes 124,819,774.85 bytes/sec total size is 7,175,385,088 speedup is 1.00 I tested a couple more things. I chopped off the last megabyte of the received half-file like so: $ truncate -s -1M BIGFILE That did chop off the damaged part of the file, so then --append worked and it took 27 seconds. Also, --append-verify found the file passed verification, so that took 48 seconds instead of 89 seconds. So for most use cases, I would not use --partial. I would just start the file transfer from scratch. Use of --append can leave me with errors in binary files (even though file size is an exact match), and --append-verify works but it can be slower than just starting over. Are there use cases where you think use of --partial followed by --append or --append-verify works much better than leaving them off? Best, Mike