rsync checksum for secure copies - good idea?

[Elliott Balsley]

I've been experimenting with various ways of synchronizing files between drives, and I remembered good old rsync. I typically have 2 or more drives on set, which each get a copy of the raw footage using R3DDM or Dusty's script. But aside from the raw footage, I have other files, like transcodes, etc., that get created on one drive and need to be duplicated to the others. Rsync seems like the perfect tool for this, and it even supports checksums! The rolling checksum algorithm used by rsync seems to be theoretically faster than MD5, but my big question for data/unix gurus like Conrad and Jeff is, is it as foolproof as md5? (Not to say md5 is foolproof, but we've sort of established that as a baseline for now in the industry.)It might be nice to have alternative and open source tools for copying even original footage from the mags.