Syncing files remotely via rsync

02.07.2020

Picture by Markus Spiske.

rsync is a great tool for copying files, especially to/from remote locations, like ssh-servers. I use it almost daily for managing this website and also for backing up some personal files to a server so I have access to them from anywhere. For syncing different computers on the same wifi I recommend Syncthing.

The command

I almost always use

rsync -avzhu --delete src dest

The options in detail

• -a archive mode: equivalent to -rlptgoD, which basically means replicate everything as exactly as possible
  • -r recurse into directories
  • -l recreate symlinks in the destination
  • -p preserve permissions in dest
  • -t preserve modification times
  • -g preserve group
  • -o preserve owner
  • -D equivalent to --devices --specials, which preserves device and special files
• -v verbose output
• -z compress the files during the transfer
• -h output numbers in human-readable format
• -u update: skip files that have a newer modification time at dest
• --delete delete extraneous files from dest

Sometimes I want to exclude a certain directory from being updated/deleted, so I use the --exclude dir option as well.

I use a small wrapper script for deploying to the webserver and for my personal documents I’ve created two wrapper scripts, one for pulling and the other one for pushing.

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