I've been using rsync for Android to backup my phone to a remote NTFS filesystem on a Linux system for a while.

Recently, the HDD containing the NTFS filesystem has started to fail (or throw "I/O Errors") so I took the opportunity to copy all the files onto a new HDD and new NTFS filesystem. In this instance I used the "FastCopy v2.11" tool for Windows.

My problem is that when I do an rsync "dry run" I can see that it wants to recopy files which already exist on the remote rsync folder. For example, when I run with "-iv" I get this kind of output:

<f..t...... extSdCard/foo/bar

Which, as I understand it means that rsync wants to copy this file to the remote rsync because of a timestamp difference.

The strange thing is that if I use "Astro" for Android to look at the local file properties, I can see that the file's size, modified time, and MD5 checksum are exactly the same as that of the remote file (using ls -l to check the modified time).

Given that I recently copied the remote rsync files from an old NTFS filesystem, the remote file's ctime is different (using ls -lc).

Does rsync look at the remote ctime, and if so is there any way I can use rsync, or ntfs-3g to get around this problem?