rsync --delete is not working

Question

OS is Debian 10, rsync version 3.1.3. I'm running rsync like this:

time rsync -ar --delete --info=progress2 --files-from=filelist.txt . /path/to/dest

This works to copy the files over, but doesn't delete anything that's been removed. (Either removed entirely from src, or in my case, removed from filelist.txt) That is a huge problem. The only workaround I have found is to simply nuke the entire destination and just copy everything over again, but this takes a huge amount of time and basically negates the point of using rsync in the first place.

Is this a bug? How do I get rsync to work properly, honoring the --delete flag like it's supposed to?

Edit:

For example:

• If filelist.txt cotains "foo" then /path/to/dest will contain "foo".
• If filelist.txt cotains "foo" and "bar" then /path/to/dest will contain "foo" and "bar".
• If filelist.txt cotains "foo", "bar", and "bat" then /path/to/dest will contain "foo", "bar", and "bat".
• etc

Assume "foo" "bar" "bat" etc are directories.

Answer 1

You need to tell rsync to delete the missing arguments:

rsync -arv --delete-missing-args --delete --info=progress2 --files-from=filelist.txt . /path/to/dest

• So if you delete the directory foo it will then also be deleted in /path/to/dest with --delete-missing-args.
• foo still needs to be listed in filelist.txt.
• the --delete argument is required to allow rsync to delete the files in the foo folder

Answer 2

No. rsync will not delete files/ dirs just because the files list do not contain those file or it is empty.

if you are using --files-from it will try to sync only the files listed from source to destination.

It will not delete the files just because they are absent from files list passed to --files-from.

For --delete to work you need to use the actual source path .. like so

rsync -ar --delete path/to/src path/to/destination