rysnc

Purpose

This can be used for copying/moving…

• From local to local (whether on your file-system, or across removable media)
• From your local to a remote
• From a remote to a local

It is similar to scp. But rsync has some more advanced features.

Local examples

Basic

Sync directory. The manpage uses -avz in examples - archive, verbose, and compress.

$ rsync [OPTIONS] foo bar

Note on forwardslash, when copying from a directory foo.

This will copy foo so there is a directory of the same name in the destination.

$ rsync foo .

This will copy the directory’s contents to the current directory without creating a new directory called foo.

$ rsync foo/ .

Common flag usage

Archive, verbose, compressed, human-readable.

$ rsync -avzh SOURCE DEST

Move

By default, rsync will copy files.

If you want to move them (i.e. delete after copy), you can use these flags:

Sender removes synchronized files (non-dir).

--remove-source-files

This tells rsync to remove from the sending side the files (meaning non-directories) that are a part of the transfer and have been successfully duplicated on the receiving side.

Note that the --delete flag and its variations will delete on the receiver (destination) so it is not appropriate here.

Dry run

--dry-run

Display

-q, --quiet
-v, --verbose

    --stats

-h, --human-readable

This option tells rsync to print information showing the progress of the transfer. This gives a bored user something to watch. This option is normally combined with -v. Using this option without the -v option will produce weird results on your display.

    --progress

Same as --partial --progress.

-P

Transfer

-z compress

Copy symlinks as links

-l, --links

Archive:

This is equivalent to -rlptgoD. It is a quick way of saying you want recursion and want to preserve almost everything (with -H being a notable omission). The only exception to the above equivalence is when --files-from is specified, in which case -r is not implied

-a, --archive

These are covered by doing archive:

-r, --recursive

--delete     # Delete extra files

Preserve

Preserve permissions, etc.

-p, --perms
-t, --times
-g, --group
-o, --owner

Sync safely

Handle long, repeat runs of possibly interrupted syncs

Partial

By default, rsync will delete any partially transferred file if the transfer is interrupted.

In some circumstances it is more desirable to keep partially transferred files. Using the --partial option tells rsync to keep the partial file which should make a subsequent transfer of the rest of the file much faster.

--partial

This is perhaps safer than ignore existing, as partial will do a checksum to see if the file is the same as the one it wants to copy, rather than just checking its presence.

Also partial might handle picking up from transferring a single large file without starting over.

Ignore existing

Ignore files which are already synced to the destination.

This tells rsync to skip updating files that already exist on the destination (this does not ignore existing directories, or nothing would get done).

--ignore-existing

Checksum

skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size

Note that this is expensive to compute on both sides.

-c, --checksum

Skip updated

Skip files newer on dest to avoid overwriting remote changes.

-u, --update

Remote examples

Syncing over SSH.

Copy to remote

$ rsync [OPTIONS] SOURCE [USER@]HOST:DEST

e.g.

• Copy to absolute path on host.

    $ rsync [OPTIONS] foo michael@192.168.1.35:/foo/bar/baz
  

• Copy to user path on a host identified from /etc/hosts. Note that USER@ is not needed if you’ve set up the remote user in the config, or perhaps if the user names are identical across systems.

    $ rsync [OPTIONS] foo michael@dell:~/Documents/baz
  

Note that tab completion is supported to.

Copy from remote

Same as above but reversed.

$ rsync [OPTIONS] [USER@]HOST:SOURCE DEST

Help

Rsync cheatsheet on DevHints.

Linux manpage - link.

Name
rsync -- a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
Synopsis

Local:  rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [DEST]
Access via remote shell:
  Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST:SRC... [DEST]
  Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST:DEST
Access via rsync daemon:
  Pull: rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST::SRC... [DEST]
        rsync [OPTION...] rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/SRC... [DEST]
  Push: rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST::DEST
        rsync [OPTION...] SRC... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/DEST

Usages with just one SRC arg and no DEST arg will list the source files instead of copying.