Dan Stromberg <dstromberglists@gmail.com> writes:

>On Sat, 03 May 2008 12:52:33 +0000, Goran Ivanic wrote:

>> Assuem I want to transfer large amounts of stuff from one server to
>> another (through Internet).
>>
>> Which method should I prefer:
>>
>> ftp or rsync ?
>>
>> What are the Pros and Cons?
>>
>> Which is faster?
>>
>> Which is more stable?
>>
>> Goran

>Here's a comparison of ssh, rsh, rsync, NFS, ftp and pnetcat for such a
>purpose:

>http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~dstro...omparison.html

Using rsync on ssh, the site
http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/
shows taht it depends on far away the other machine is. If it is on the
same network where the roundtrip times are say 100usec, then even on Gb
links the standard ssh buffer is fast enough. If the machine to which you
are transfering stuff is much further away (many 10s-100s of msec) then ssh
acts as a bottleneck. But the code on that page claims to fix that problem.

So, for stability and for verification of the transfer, it is hard to beat
rsync. ftp, nfs,... do not verify that the data received is the same as the
data transfered. Of course you can put in an extra step to verify it.