Kenneth R Westerback <kwesterb...@rogers.com> wrote: > People use cvsync or rsync to create/maintain a local copy or copies
[...] > Not sure what your 'reliable' metrics are, but works for me. My question was not about what people do or if it works (till now) for you. It was about the algorithm. Is the algorithm correct in the sense that it *always* give the right result, or there is only a (high) probability that in practical cases it gives the right result? Just this is my question. You make copy file F from computer A to computer B, compute the hash in both copies and see if they coincide. This is just a check of the transmition, of course it is possible that the copy is corrupted and in spite of it have the same hash. A completely other thing is to conclude that two *arbitrary* pieces of data are the same only because they have the same hash. Arbitrary means here that the one was not a copy of the other. And this is what rsync seems to do as far as I understand the wikipedia web-page. Regards Rodrigo