Understanding Rsync Backup Statistics

LBackup uses rsync for the transfer of files over the network and also for local backups. The '–stats' option is passed to rsync and this results in various statistics of the data transfer being displayed within the LBackup logs each time a backup complets successfully.

Below is a snippet from the LBackup man page regarding the definition of various statistics from which rsync reports on after each successful execution of LBackup.


       This  tells  rsync  to  print a verbose set of statistics on the
              file transfer, allowing you to tell how effective rsync's delta-
              transfer algorithm is for your data.

              The current statistics are as follows:

              o      Number  of  files  is  the  count  of all "files" (in the
                     generic sense),  which  includes  directories,  symlinks,
                     etc.

              o      Number  of files transferred is the count of normal files
                     that were updated via rsync's  delta-transfer  algorithm,
                     which does not include created dirs, symlinks, etc.

              o      Total file size is the total sum of all file sizes in the
                     transfer.  This does not count any size  for  directories
                     or  special files, but does include the size of symlinks.

              o      Total transferred file size is the total sum of all files
                     sizes for just the transferred files.

              o      Literal  data  is  how much unmatched file-update data we
                     had to send to  the  receiver  for  it  to  recreate  the
                     updated files.

              o      Matched  data  is  how much data the receiver got locally
                     when recreating the updated files.

              o      File list size is how big the file-list data was when the
                     sender sent it to the receiver.  This is smaller than the
                     in-memory size for the file list due to some  compressing
                     of duplicated data when rsync sends the list.

              o      File  list  generation time is the number of seconds that
                     the sender spent creating the file list.  This requires a
                     modern  rsync on the sending side for this to be present.

              o      File list transfer time is the number of seconds that the
                     sender spent sending the file list to the receiver.

              o      Total bytes sent is the count of all the bytes that rsync
                     sent from the client side to the server side.

              o      Total bytes received is  the  count  of  all  non-message
                     bytes  that  rsync  received  by the client side from the
                     server side.  "Non-message" bytes  means  that  we  don't
                     count  the  bytes  for  a verbose message that the server
                     sent to us, which makes the stats more consistent.