• rsync

Install Rsync

aptitude update
aptitude install rsync

Use rsync

Backup from source to destination

• If you have a directory source, and you want to back it up into the directory destination, do:

rsync -a source/ destination/
or
rsync -av source/ destination/

a - archive
v - verbose; show more information

Backup over ssh

• Now lets try destination on a remote machine, over a secure shell.
• Make sure source and destination server have rsync installed.

rsync -a -e ssh source/ username@remotemachine.com:/path/to/destination/
or
rsync -av -e ssh source/ username@remotemachine.com:/path/to/destination/

a -archive
e -remote shell
v -verbose; show more information

Trailing slashes

• rsync does care about the trailing slash, but only on the source argument.

• This means that if you rsync source and destination like this:

Source: source/myfile.txt

rsync -a source destination

Destination: destination/source/myfile.txt

vs

Source: source/myfile.txt

rsync -a source/ destination

Destination: destination/myfile.txt

--delete

• If for example this is second time you are rsyncing the source and destination; you delete a file in source/ and you want it to be deleted in destination/ you will have to use --delete option. The default behavior is to leave the copy at destination/ in place.

rsync -a --delete source/ destination/

a - archive
delete - To delete a file in destination if it is not in source

rsync incremental backups

• Backups should be read-only.

rsync always unlinks hard linked files before overwriting

• rsync does backup differently.If today is Friday, the Thursday backup is the "full" backup (always the most recent one) and Monday,T,W have the incremental changes.

rsync way does full backup once, instead of once per week You can't rsync to a tape

rsyncd deamon

• When using deamon mode you can set the public rsync server, or user based rsync server.
• To enable rsync as a deamon you can do the following.
• Edit

vi /etc/default/rsync

• Set the

RSYNC_ENABLE=true

• Now you need to create an rsync conf file that will tell rsync server what to share. You can find a sample file in share/doc

cp /usr/share/doc/rsync/examples/rsyncd.conf /etc/rsyncd.conf 

• Now start rsync

sudo /etc/init.d/rsync start

• Now see if you can access rsync server. You might need to create /var/www/pub

rsync localhost::ftp

• You should see:

drwxr-xr-x        4096 2009/06/17 21:55:55 .

• Done

Troubleshooting

Timestamp

• If you get files copied even do they didn't change, and you are mounting via samba, add:

--modify-window=10

Bibliography

• Initially based on: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/