I've been solidly copying files in to my new 20Gb empeg for the best part
of a week now using emptool 0.83 over the tediously slow serial link (not
having tried to get USB working in linux yet) but it hasn't been easy.

Originally I used ``upload -r'' to do my whole mp3 directory tree,
but doing 20Gb in one go seemed to be a bit much for it to cope with.
So I tried doing it one disk at a time (each disk is in its own directory
tree). Then I realised that certain non-mp3 files I have lying about
got uploaded too, and that some of these files seem to cause emptool to
core dump. I can't find the source for emptool anywhere so I don't know
if this is a plausible reason for the crashes of if I was just running
in to size limits again.

To avoid that problem, I tried uploading individual files. I'm now
running a simple expect script to emptool which takes a list of pathnames
and converts them in to the necessary ``mklist'', ``cd'' and ``upload''
commands to preserve the tree structure. This potters along for a while
before emptool falls over with one of several messages: occasionally
the core dump I got before; more often ``Failed to write tune data''
(there's en error code there too which I have neglected to record).
My script isn't very bright and sometimes manages to blunder on past
this error. When I eventually intervene manually, I usually have to do
a database repair and maybe re-link a few files from the ``Unattached
items'' directory, then let my script carry on. Last night, however,
I found that repair reported 930 errors and moved every single one of
the 871 tracks I have uploaded so far in to an undifferentiated heap in
the ``Unattached items'' directory. What a mess! Using the ``lookup''
command and moving things about by FID I was able to automate sorting
it all out, but I now have a few duplicates that I don't think were
there before.

I already have a well-organised collection so I just want to do
the equivalent of:
scp -r /home/mp3/* empeg:/
The post to which I am replying describes a system using rsync that
sounds exactly like what I want. Where can I find out how to do this?