My rsync Command
Ok so I started out using rsync with the options ‘-a –progress –delete’ and I thought that was doin’ the job just fine. But recently I migrated our old 600mhz Dell Optiplex GX110 to a Sans Digital MobileNAS MN2L dual drive RAID NAS and the rsyncs weren’t going as planned.
The rsync argument ‘-a’ preserves permissons, owner, groups, etc. (-a for archive) but I would run it repeatedly to get the latest changes and it would start copying the whole thing over again. After visiting the rsync man page I came up with a new set of arguments that seem to be working out great.
rsync -rtmvh --stats --progress /path/to/source /path/to/destination/
Argument descriptions:
-r, –recursive recurse into directories
-t, –times preserve modification times
-m, –prune-empty-dirs prune empty directory chains from file-list
-v, –verbose increase verbosity
-h, –human-readable output numbers in a human-readable format
–stats give some file-transfer stats
–progress show progress during transfer
*Optional: –delete delete extraneous files from dest dir
I wanted to log this before my .bash_history gets messed up again. 
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Diego Alvarez
Excelent script
The only thing is that –stats –progress –delete hast to be with –:
rsync -rtmvh –stats –progress –delete /path/to/source/ /path/to/destination/
Thanks
Jan 31st, 2008
sam
Yeah I forgot that’s a common problem with the editor in Wordpress, it turns double-slashes into one.
Thanks a lot, if you have other any improvements or caveats please contribute.
* All right - I remembered to put the command in <code></code> tags.
* I installed SyntaxHighlighter Plus and used ‘bash’ as the language but the command shows up funny
It’s still an improvement I guess.
Thanks, Sam
Jan 31st, 2008
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