Rsync Cheatsheet

Rsync is a tool that makes it easy to copy or sync contents across local and remote computers.

• To one-way sync a file:

$ rsync -av /home/joe/from-dir/specific-file /media/backup/to-dir

• To one-way sync between local or remote directories:

$ rsync -av /home/joe/from-dir /media/backup/to-dir

$ rsync -av /home/joe/from-dir chetan@some-remote:/media/backup/to-dir

$ rsync -av chetan@some-remote:/home/chetan/from-dir /media/backup/to-dir

$ rsync -av joe@some-remote-1:/home/joe/from-dir chetan@some-remote-2:/media/backup/to-dir

This recursively copies over all the files and directories in the source directory.

-v is verbose, to print list of files being synced. -a is a combination of options required for archival: -rlptgoD.

Prying apart the options inherent in -a, we get: -r recursive, -l copy symlinks as symlinks, -p preserve permissions, -t preserve modification times, -g preserve group, -o preserve owner and -D preserve device files and special files.

• When source file is a symlink, it will be copied over to destination as a symlink. Add -L option to copy the contents from the file that the source symlink points to, to the destination:

$ rsync -avL /home/joe/from-dir/specific-file /media/backup/to-dir

• To one-way sync such that the destination is a strict mirror copy, thus deleting any extra files (--delete) it may have:

$ rsync -av --delete /home/joe/from-dir /media/backup/to-dir

• To one-way sync using compression (-z) to save transfer time, especially if a remote computer is involved:

$ rsync -avz /home/joe/from-dir chetan@some-remote:/media/backup/to-dir

• No trailing slash on source directory: this copies the source directory itself as a subdirectory into the destination directory.

For example:

$ rsync -a /some/path/foobar .
$ ls
foobar/

• Trailing slash on source directory: this copies the contents inside source directory into the destination directory.

For example:

$ rsync -a /some/path/foobar/ .
$ ls
content.txt
of.txt
foobar.txt

• When source path has spaces: We need to double up with both double quotes and slashes. This is because the local shell acts on the path and strips its quotes or slashes before passing it to rsync.

$ rsync joe@foobar:"path/to/some\ thing" .

• To copy only the files in the source directory, we need to turn off the recursive option:

$ rsync -a --no-recursive /some/path/foobar/ .

Tried with: rsync 3.1.2 and Ubuntu 18.04