Linux NTFS to NTFS rsync repeatedly recopying files

Solution 1:

As per my second update, the permissions of my user did not allow me to set times. Running the rsync using the root account on the destination machine, along with --modify-window=5 gave me suitable behaviour. (If you don't have root access on the destination, the -u flag could help, but only if you're sure no-one will change the files on the remote system.)

Solution 2:

Ideally you always want to use robocopy as it handles variations in timestamps (upto 2 seconds for FAT). You can run in inside Wine but connecting to the remote host might be inconvenient.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145(WS.10).aspx

edit: per Steve's comment, this feature appears to now be in rsync 3.0:

--modify-window

When comparing two timestamps, rsync treats the timestamps as being equal if they differ by no more than the modify-window value. This is normally 0 (for an exact match), but you may find it useful to set this to a larger value in some situations. In particular, when transferring to or from an MS Windows FAT filesystem (which represents times with a 2-second resolution), --modify-window=1 is useful (allowing times to differ by up to 1 second).