doesn't that sound like dropbox? Yup! There are tons of other features that Dropbox has that rsync doesn't, but at the gist of it, dropbox is a fancy and glorified rsync with durability added.įor this section, if you're coding along, I am assuming that you have access to a remote server. If you have access to a remote server, you can quickly sync your directory locally with a remote server, vice versa. You can use rsync over a network connection. It is safe to say you will want to run rsync -a 90% of the time. The big picture is, running rsync -a preserves all the important metadata when transferring files. -o preserves owner (only for super-user).-p preserves file permissions / privileges.-l copies symlinks and keep them as symlinks.Whoa, that's a lot of options! Don't worry, let's break it down: This is analogous to running rsync -rlptgoD. If you read online articles about rsync, you will notice that many developers use the -a command ( -archive). Break things! Just make sure you make a backup first (see what I did there? :D) Only by doing these you'll get the most out of this article.Īt its core, the rsync command looks like this:Įnter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Moreover, don't just type everything you see in this article and stop there. I find it more useful when learning a new thing if I actually type the commands. I would strongly encourage you to code along. Why copy mostly the same data if you can just copy only the differences? This lets you minimize the network usage, which can be useful if you have a small bandwidth. You will only have to transfer 0.1GB of data.

With rsync, you won't have to copy the whole 1.1GB of data from A to B. Then you add small changes of about 0.1GB. Assume that you also have directory B with the same 1GB of files. Suppose that your source directory A contains files totaling 1GB in size. cp copies everything from one location to another, while rsync copies the deltas (the differences) from one location to another.

Some of you may wonder, 'Well, why can't I just use the copy command cp, that way I don't have to learn a new command?' These two are two different programs. These directories can be inside the same machine or between two connected machines. It is a tool to transfer and synchronize files in different directories. If you've been programming for a while, you may have heard of rsync.

Rsync backup script