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.
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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)
One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.
Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like
goodman-rsyncthat would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.So nine times out of 10 I just want
rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST}but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”?dumbman rsyncand I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining whatazvhactually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.tldrandatuinhave been my main way of remembering complex but frequent flag combinations