Backing up documents using rsync

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Backing up documents using rsync

We can backup entire documents from one machine to another using syntax like:

rsync -vtrp --partial --delete --ignore-errors saurabh@10.5.1.222:/documents/ /documents/

Here:

• -v is for verbose
• -t is for copying timestamps
• -r is for recursion
• -p is for permissions
• --partial is so that partial files are not deleted. Note that using --partial is better than using --inplace because of the diff algorithm and it also allows destination file to always be in consistent state.
• --delete to delete files on destination that are not present on source. Careful
• --ignore-errors to ignore errors occurred during copying. This may be because of root owned folders like lost+found in source dir. Use with caution

Apart from above options other useful options to consider are:

• --progress to see progress of file being copied if you are copying big files like movies, etc.
• -n to cause rsync to perform dry run and not do any changes. It is very useful if you want to use --delete option
• -L to cause following of symbolic link dirs as if they are real dirs and make their copy also on destination.