Case-sensitivity is painful with VFAT.. I would have put a real filesystem on my new external hard drive, but I thought it would be nice to plug it into anyone’s box and be able to read/write.. Syncing up my audio directory failed when many upper-case ‘CD1′, ‘CD2′, etc directories were created in lower-case, as well as rsync wanting to iterate through every file again.. The magic:

sudo mount -o uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,iocharset=utf8 /dev/sdc1 /mnt/
rsync --modify-window=1 -rtv ~/media/audio/ /mnt/media/audio/