Rsync with specific day condition in respective subdirectories

Question

I have two identical folders with subfolders for development and live like:

/development/subdirectory1
/development/subdirectory1/subsub1
/development/subdirectory2
/development/subdirectory2/subsub2
/development/subdirectory2/subsub2/subsubsub2

/live/subdirectory1
/live/subdirectory1/subsub1
/live/subdirectory2
/live/subdirectory2/subsub2
/live/subdirectory2/subsub2/subsubsub2

And I want to rsync all recent work done after a specific from development folder to live folder.

To do this, I am using

find development/ -type f -newermt '2/2/2020 0:00:00' -exec rsync -avz {} live/ \;

But what's happening is that all files from development are being copied to live folder's root even the files are in subfolders of development folder. But what I want is rsync to sync files in their exact subfolders on destination.

So, basically what I want is to perform 'rsync -avz' to update files after a specific date.

I have tried multiple solutions also to find solution, but could not. Tried with --files-from. Any thought on this?

Answer 1

You can feed the set of files to be copied into a single instance of rsync. The missing part of the puzzle is to retain the source path in the destination:

find development/./ -type f -newermt '2/2/2020' |
    rsync --dry-run -vtpR --files-from - . live/

The . in the source path for find marks the point from which the path is to be retained in the destination. I've omitted your -z flag because compression is not performed when copying locally. Remove the --dry-run when you're happy it's going to do what you hope it will.

Note that rsync is not really doing anything clever here. You could equally use tar (or pax):

tar cf - -C development --newer-mtime='2020-02-02' . | tar xvf - -C live