hard disk activity

[Paul Rubin]

"VSmirk" <vania.smirk at gmail.com> writes:
> Aweseme!!!  I got as far as segmenting the large file on my own, and I
> ran out of ideas.  I kind of thought about checksum, but I never put
> the two together.
> 
> Thanks.  You've helped a lot....

The checksum method I described works ok if bytes change in the middle
of the file but don't get inserted (piecs of the file don't move
around).  If you insert on byte in the middle of a 1GB file (so it
becomes 1GB+1 byte) then all the checksums after the middle block
change, which is no good for your purpose.

Rsync is a very clever program.  Rather than re-implement its
algorithm maybe you should just install it and use it, either directly
(instead of writing a Python program) or under control of a Python
program, using os.system or the subprocess module.