Optimize moves done locally

[unphased]

I have a workflow that I wonder

• if rsync already supports and I don't know about it
• otherwise, if it makes sense for rsync to maybe think about being able to do

Use case:

• I want to quickly organize some (let's say large) files by moving them around into directories on the source computer. As an example, I had files "linux/ubuntu.iso", "linux/fedora.iso", "linux/arch.iso", "linux/debian.iso" and I move arch and debian into a new dir I make, "linux/test/".
• On the destination computer these iso files have already been placed there in a linux/ subdir from a previous rsync operation.
• When we perform an rsync of linux/, the two iso's we've just moved into linux/test/ will consume bandwidth from source to destination.
• I'm hoping for rsync to be able to be smart about this and check some content hashes or something like that and figure out that local copies or moves on the destination would do the trick to complete any of the sync operations. This would consume no bandwidth and be extremely fast.
• Bonus points for added flags to let the tool attempt a search farther up in the dir tree to look for potential matches prior to resorting to performing data transfer Hmm on second thought this idea seems maybe bad

Anyone like this idea? I see a couple of problematic aspects I guess:

• Content hashing isn't exactly free. it could be cached e.g. during previous transfers,, but it seems problematic to start littering content hash files (sorta like thumbnail and other lame proprietary tiny files) around. maybe we could even just filter off of filename and filesize first as a way to prune somehow. But even though the content check may be time consuming, at least it is usually orders of magnitude faster than the network bandwidth.