Jeremy, This may be a common misunderstanding of the value of rsync. rsync's 'delta transmission' of changed records comes at a high cost of disk file checksumming: basically your computer checksums all the blocks of each file, sends to rsync server, which does same file checksum, and then sends only changed blocks. This reduces network transport, but at cost of lots of disk access and CPU computation (on both server and client). For a busy data server, rsync costs much more time (in disk, cpu use) and actually gets the file to you more slowly than simple but robust FTP. Rsync typically uses a full CPU for minutes / file, while FTP is very lightweight on the server. IUBio/Bio-mirror can support multiple FTP processes from one client (I recommend no more than 15). Using multiple Rsync processes from the same client is a not-nice thing due to high cpu/disk cost to server. Try this test with a 100+ MB file: /usr/bin/time rsync rsync://bio-mirror.net/biomirror/blast/env_nr.tar.gz . -au 51.51 real touch -t 200109110825 env_nr.tar.gz /usr/bin/time rsync rsync://bio-mirror.net/biomirror/blast/env_nr.tar.gz . -au --no-whole-file 58.87 real 2.53 user 1.52 sys /usr/bin/time wget -nv -nH --mirror ftp://bio-mirror.net/biomirror/blast/env_nr.tar.gz 7.30 real 0.04 user 1.56 sys touch -t 200109110825 biomirror/blast/env_nr.tar.gz /usr/bin/time wget -nv -nH --mirror ftp://bio-mirror.net/biomirror/blast/env_nr.tar.gz 6.61 real 0.02 user 1.72 sys (my times are on local GB ethernet ) -- Don -- d.gilbert--bioinformatics--indiana-u--bloomington-in-47405 -- gilbertd at indiana.edu--http://marmot.bio.indiana.edu/