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Using Rsync for real

Posted 3 September 2006, 22:44. (Filed under: by Andrew)

In Rsync on Windows for strongspace I ran through installing and testing Rsync, but in order to use it effectively for backing up, I need to write something to do comprehensive, safe backups.

First off, options for rsync. I’m going to use:
rsync -rltvz "Pictures" username@subdomain.strongspace.com:backup

  • -r: Recursive, so I get subdirectories as well
  • -l: Copy symlinks as symlinks. Don’t know what this does on Windows, but if it stops Rsync following shortcuts, then it’s a good thing,
  • -t: Preserve file timestamps.
  • -v: Verbose – seems unnecessary until something goes wrong and you want to see exactly which files got transferred
  • -z: Use compression, because processor cycles are cheap, and network bandwidth is a bottleneck

I didn’t put backup/Pictures as the destination, because then you get all your files in backup/Pictures/Pictures. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this with different slashes, but this will do me for now.

I currently have to change onto the correct drive where my files are for this to work. If I specify “G:/Pictures” (or “G:\Pictures”) then rsync thinks this is a remote source, which isn’t allowed. I’ll have to fix this when I run this lot as a script, but for the initial file transfer, from the command line, changing to g: first will do.

Talking of scripts, I’ll save those for another post, once my initial file transfer is complete. They’ll be written in Python, because Python’s what I do best.

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