this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Hey all!

Let me go stratight to the point:

I have an audio player in which I want to clone my ~/Music directory when I connect it to my computer. The only relevant thing about it is that it's a barebones filesystem and I cannot run cool stuff like Syncthing on the player (otherwise this question would already have a solution). Right now, my solution is that I connect the player to the computer and manually copy file to and delete files in the player. As you may have guessed, this is an error prone process. In order to solve that, I want to run a single command that clones ~/Music (src) into /path/to/player/Music (dst).

My requirements are:

  • All new files in src MUST be copied into dst.
  • All files no longer present in src MUST be deleted from dst.
  • All files present in both src and dst that have more recent modifications in src MUST be copied and overwritten into dst.

As you can see, my player's filesystem is a strict replica of my main computer's. Now, I know I can write a Python script in an afternoon to do just that, but I want to know if there are any good tools first to do this. I searched the web in hope that rsync would help me here, but the only answers I can find are for buffier cp. It may be that I have a vocabulary problem and I'm not searching for the correct terms.

I'd love to read your ideas! A note about LLMs: I'm not interested at all in any comments about how llm-of-the-week coded this in a moment, I asked fake-chat and here's what it said or whatever. If you are not a human that can be bothered to write an answer, I won't be bothered to read it.

Thank you!

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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Why not rsync? Off the top of my head: rsync -avp --delete src/* dst/

Stop googling and just read the rsync man page

[–] groctel@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Stop googling and just read the rsync man page

Fair enough, sometimes you get tunnel vision with a problem.

For what I see the command doing, thanks for the progress flag, it seems to be doing what I need. Reading the manual, it also looks like it's not copying files that have the same size and timestamp in the source and destination, which is also what I wanted, even though I didn't make it explicit. I'll have to take a look to making the command parallel, probably by running it on every subdirectory of ~Music at once.

Thank you for your help!

[–] lime@feddit.nu 3 points 1 day ago

rsync is made for quickly backing up huge directories over whatever connection. believe me you won't need to script anything or parallelise it. just check the available flags.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You probably want an uppercase P.

rsync -avP --delete src/* dst/
[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oops, I did actually mean -p but that's included in -a. Years of muscle memory doesn't go away. -P is a good one too though.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 2 points 1 day ago

I always remember alien vs Predator. And the Predator is uppercase because he's more intelligent. And sometimes alien vz Predator if I want compression.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 3 points 1 day ago

i agree with shadow, just use rsync.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't remember what all everything does but my default to move to my mp3 player is

systemd-inhibit rsync -avh --delete source dest

The systemd-inhibit is to keep it from falling asleep, --delete removes any files present at destination but not at source.

Out of curiosity, how do you organize your file formats? I have a mess of separate FLAC and separate MP3 files. I'll just regularly convert all my FLAC to a mirrored directory of MP3s and copy that onto SD.

It's a pain in the butt though.

I finally almost have 64gb of music the max on my SD card, so it's time to start throwing music into an archive, too.

[–] groctel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't save FLAC files, as I don't have that much space (my library is 82GB big with 17629 tracks atm). What I do is that I have a script I wrote to convert all the files to Opus. I still have some old mp3s laying around that I convert or find better sources over time.

As for rsync command, it's taken far longer than I would like to sync all the files. I've gotten an idea about caching the filesystem status for later uses to speed up the process, so I may end up writing a script after all!

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

You know more than I do, I think, but how would writing the script speed up the file transfer?

The first time you use rsync, it's going to take a long ass time because you are copying EVERY file. But after the first sync, you're just copying changes, so it'll take much less time.

I use fre:ac to convert things pretty trivially, but I suspect you may enjoy writing scripts, to which I say: enjoy!