Software :: How To Control File Order In Rsync

I am looking for a way to control the order in which files (or more specifically, certain subtrees) are updated for a very large rsync update done daily. There is a finite time frame and finite bandwidth to do these updates, and they usually do NOT complete. I want to control the order so that more important files are copied earlier.

What I have been doing is breaking up the rsync runs into a few steps where the first step is a very limited set of subtrees using --include and/or --exclude, and each step thereafter is increasing the amount, until the last step is the whole tree to be updated. This is not working because the time it takes to transfer the file list is large (varying from 10 minutes to 40 minutes depending on step). I really need to get this back down to doing a single rsync run to reduce that wasted time.

I cannot ultimately split things because there are a lot of hardlinks that need to be retained (or else the destination space and bandwidth would be exceeded).

I was looking at rsync's batch mode. My thought was if I could get a list of what needs to be updated, I could then sort that list and do just 1 more rsync run to do the updates in the order I want. But it turns out the batch mode file is in some cryptic binary format. I really have no idea if that could have worked.

The order selection is not simply based on the names in the top directory, so I cannot simply just list those in the preferred order on the command line (otherwise, yes, that would control the order). If I do list directory names from various depths, that list gets flattened into the destination directory, which would not work to replicate the whole tree exactly.