On Sunday 24 February 2008, »Q« wrote:
> Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> > I'm thinking of something like md5sum for directories.
>
> I think you may have gotten better solutions for your situation, but
> md5deep (in portage) is like md5sum but with directory recursion.

I'm probably not suggesting anything you don't already know, but just in case:

Notwithstanding that rsync is a superior tool just made for the job, I more 
often use tar instead of either rsync or cp.  This is because when I back up 
a complete fs I use whichever LiveCD I have at hand (usually Knoppix) which 
doesn't always have rsync on it.  Anyway, the tar command has the option -d 
which diffs the contents of the archive and the original fs, if you want to 
see what happened after the archive was written, or want to decide if it is 
time/worth making a fresher back up.  Alternatively and more appropriately 
if you run this as part of a back up process, there is the -W option.  From 
the man page:

-W, --verify
              attempt to verify the archive after writing it

HTH.
-- 
Regards,
Mick