[lug] Interface CRC error on USB connected SATA drive

[Davide Del Vento]

>> If you're just wanting to validate that the metadata is the same, I
>> think maybe rsync could help with that somehow?
>
> At this point, I'm at the end of the exercise, but I'll ponder on that
> one too. Might be some way to get it to do something like a dummy run,
> showing what a sync would look like, which could expose things.

rsync has the --dry-run option which does exaclty what you asked.
However it assumes timestamp, which the tar doesn't (but check content
and permissions instead).

> Of course, if it's useful, someone already wrote it. But of course what's
> cool about Linux is we can roll our own using existing tools too.

I wish there was one version of hashdeep which could do all the above,
with additional "flexibility" switches, such as:

--check-everything  # can't be --fast
--fast                     # same as --ignore-content
--ignore-content      # only check size
--ignore-mtime
--ignore-ctime
--ignore-atime
--ignore-owner
--ignore-group
--ignore-group-permissions
etc etc

Wait, I could write such a thing, maybe forking hashdeep ;-)