~/Blog

Brandon Rozek

Photo of Brandon Rozek

PhD Student @ RPI, Writer of Tidbits, and Linux Enthusiast

Download Changes

Published on

Updated on

Warning: This post has not been modified for over 2 years. For technical posts, make sure that it is still relevant.

When testing daily ISO images, it is useful to only download the parts of the ISO that has changed since the previous days. That way we can preserve time and bandwidth.

Rsync method

This approach requires server-side support, and a lot of flags specified.

rsync --times \
  --compress --partial \
  --progress --stats \
  --human-readable \
  --human-readable \
  rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/kubuntu/daily-live/20200412/focal-desktop-amd64.iso \
  kubuntu-focal-desktop-amd64.iso
Flag Description
--times Transfer modification times along with the files.
--compress Compress the file data during transit.
--partial Keep partial downloads if interrupted.
--progress Print information showing the progress of the /transfer.
--stats Print a set of statistics on the file transfer.
--human-readable Output numbers in a more human readable format, can use up to 3 times.

Zsync method

This approach does not involve adding a bunch of flags, but it does require the provider to have a .zsync file on their server and for the user to have the zync package installed. This package typically isn’t installed by default on most systems.

zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/20200412/focal-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync

Have any questions or want to chat: Reply via Email

Enjoyed this post?

Published a response to this? :