I need to keep in sync a very large directory structure (a few hundreds GB) between a Windows machine and a Linux machine. I'm using rsync to do the copy because it automatically ignores unchanged files and is more effective at copying changed files (copying only the difference).
The problem I have is that some applications running on the Windows file system like to generate all kinds of metadata files that I don't want to copy. As all these files are hidden using Windows file attributes, I thought it would be very helpful to simply instruct rsync to ignore such files. But the rsync man page does not offer any such option.
Currently I mount the Windows file system using SMB. When I use a console to list the files in the directory (using ls -l
), it lists all the files including hidden files, but when I use nautilus to list the files it recognizes that some are hidden files and only shows them to me if I enable "show hidden files". So I'm not sure if rsync can even see that Windows files are hidden.
Any suggestions will be really helpful.