Ip-rsync is available at the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab Web site and can be downloaded and compiled in a manner identical to rsync (https://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/iprsync/). Our modifications introduce no additional dependencies to the build process of ip-rsync.
Making use of ip-rsync should be pose no problems for anyone familiar with the use of rsync. Ip-rsync accepts all command-line arguments of rsync with a few additions. To enable in-place reconstruction you must specify -i on the command line. This directs rsync to reconstruct the file in-place rather than using temporary space. The -stats option now displays statistics relevant to ip-rsync. The statistics include memory overhead, bandwidth overhead, and compression loss due to in-place reconstruction.
To synchronize a file using in-place reconstruction across the network, a user invokes rsync with the source file and the destination file: rsync -i source.txt host.example.com:/path/to/dest.txt. A few messages will appear noting the progress of the synchronization and indicating its successful completion.
Ip-rsync's in-place reconstruction is not compatible with previous versions of rsync. Thus, both hosts involved in the transfer must support in-place reconstruction. Ip-rsync maintains backward compatibility and will synchronize with a peer running rsync.