You might not even like rsync. Yeah it's old. Yeah it's slow. But if you're working with Linux you're going to need to know it. In this video I walk through my favorite everyday flags for rsync. Su...

You might not even like rsync. Yeah it’s old. Yeah it’s slow. But if you’re working with Linux you’re going to need to know it.

In this video I walk through my favorite everyday flags for rsync.

Support the channel:
https://patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
https://ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
https://thestopbits.bandcamp.com/

Here’s a companion blog post, where I cover a bit more detail: https://vkc.sh/everyday-rsync

Also, @BreadOnPenguins made an awesome rsync video and you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifQI5uD6VQ

Lastly, I left out all of the ssh setup stuff because I made a video about that and the blog post goes into a smidge more detail. If you want to see a video covering the basics of using SSH, I made one a few years ago and it’s still pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKsdbjzBcc

Chapters:
1:18 Invoking rsync
4:05 The --delete flag for rsync
5:30 Compression flag: -z
6:02 Using tmux and rsync together
6:30 but Veronica… why not use (insert shiny object here)

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    231·
    10 days ago

    I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution. But it is one of the best transfer/archiving solutions.

    Yes, it is INCREDIBLY powerful and is often 90% of what people actually want/need. But to be an actual backup solution you still need infrastructure around that. Bare minimum is a crontab. But if you are actually backing something up (not just copying it to a local directory) then you need some logging/retry logic on top of that.

    At which point you are building your own borg, as it were. Which, to be clear, is a great thing to do. But… backups are incredibly important and it is very much important to understand what a backup actually needs to be.

    • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
      8·
      10 days ago

      I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.

      Yeah, if you want to use rsync specifically for backups, you’re probably better-off using something like rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently, and drive it from something like backupninja, which will run the task periodically and notify you if it fails.

      rsync: one-way synchronization

      unison: bidirectional synchronization

      git: synchronization of text files with good interactive merging.

      rdiff-backup: rsync-based backups. I used to use this and moved to restic, as the backupninja target for rdiff-backup has kind of fallen into disrepair.

      That doesn’t mean “don’t use rsync”. I mean, rsync’s a fine tool. It’s just…not really a backup program on its own.

      • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
        31·
        10 days ago

        Having a synced copy elsewhere is not an adequate backup and snapshots are pretty important. I recently had RAM go bad and my most recent backups had corrupt data, but having previous snapshots saved the day.

        • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
          1·
          9 days ago

          Don’t understand the downvotes. This is the type of lesson people have learned from losing data and no sense in learning it the hard way yourself.

          • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            9 days ago

            How would you pin down something like this? If it happened to me, I expect I just wouldn’t understand what’s going on.

      • koala@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Beware rdiff-backup. It certainly does turn rsync (not a backup program) into a backup program.

        However, I used rdiff-backup in the past and it can be a bit problematic. If I remember correctly, every “snapshot” you keep in rdiff-backup uses as many inodes as the thing you are backing up. (Because every “file” in the snapshot is either a file or a hard link to an identical version of that file in another snapshot.) So this can be a problem if you store many snapshots of many files.

        But it does make rsync a backup solution; a snapshot or a redundant copy is very useful, but it’s not a backup.

        (OTOH, rsync is still wonderful for large transfers.)

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I use rsync and a pruning script in crontab on my NFS mounts. I’ve tested it numerous times breaking containers and restoring them from backup. It works great for me at home because I don’t need anything older than 4 monthly, 4 weekly, and 7 daily backups.

      However, in my job I prefer something like bacula. The extra features and granularity of restore options makes a world of difference when someone calls because they deleted prod files.