Comments on: How to use rsync for transferring files under Linux or UNIX

By: Deepa

Deepa — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:35:49 +0000

Hi,
I am doing a rsync between two servers. I have put the script in crontab file so that it runs automatically everyday at night. But the problem is that rsync stops once it encounters a large file. But, surprisingly, If I execute the same script from the CLI, it works perfectly right. Only, when it happens in the background via rsync, it gets stuck. Please advise what could be the issue. Do settings need to be changed somewhere.

Thanks in advance.
Deepa

By: Tapan Bhanot

Tapan Bhanot — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:58:45 +0000

Hello,

How to use rsync with a username and password that is supplied by the remote server ?

I have a tar file which I need to upload to a remote server. The remote server has provided me with IP address, a username and a password. How do I use rsync with the username and password to upload the file on remote server ??

Thanks.

By: Eric Gillette

Eric Gillette — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 01:44:30 +0000

This is a fantastic explanation of rSync and all it’s idiosyncrasies.

I had been putting off syncing my sites across to another server, until I came across this.

Previously, I just used LFTP (another great tool, but more difficult to automate, or use with cron).

Thanks a bunch!

By: Igo Konrads

Igo Konrads — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:12:03 +0000

This is exactly what I am after. Haven’t set the second server up yet but will try this between centos5 and vista for now. I hope this is gonna be good enough to get rid of the useless Plesk backup tool. Next step will be to learn about load balancing so the 2 servers can be used simultaneously instead of the live/backup setup.

By: Avin

Avin — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 04:12:40 +0000

Very Nice Article…

Can You please give more details about –delete option ?
When Shall I use this option ?

By: Meghraj

Meghraj — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:21:02 +0000

I found this article very useful especially for beginners. I will try to contribute as more as possible, so it would be helpful for others…

By: Dinesh Jadhav

Dinesh Jadhav — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:39:47 +0000

Lets say we wanted to copy all of the files under our local directory, “/usbdisk/” and place a copy on the machine “somemachine” under the remote directory “/backups/”. The name of the user on the remote machine is “dinesh”. Notice we added the “-z” argument so all data will be compressed over the network. We could use the following line:

rsync -avz /usbdisk/ dinesh@somemachine:/backups/

By: Jay Boyd

Jay Boyd — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:34:02 +0000

Very helpful post. Thanks.

By: shiva

shiva — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:37:32 +0000

hello,
I have one clearification on working of rsyn
how data will transfor wheather bytes leval or block leval or file leval.

By: Hartmut Laue

Hartmut Laue — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:13:09 +0000

Hello,

I am using rsync under ubuntu on my netbook to duplicate the contents of my /home to an SD-Card, by

rsync -av –delete /home/x/ /media/SD-Card/home.x.backup

Running this command, the program seems to do what it should. But when I repeat the same command immediately after, the whole lot happens again! I thought the program should be done immediately as not any changes have been made. What is wrong?

(I don’t know if it plays a role how the hard disks are formatted. The source is ext4 while the SD-Card is FAT32 (or VFAT). Could it be an explanation that FAT can’t save the information on ownership (rights) so that on starting rsync a second time the program views all files as different and does the same job as before again?)

By: Tone Williams

Tone Williams — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:34:38 +0000

@akpk and vivek
Thank you very much! This post along with your response on how to store results to a text file has been most useful!

By: akpk

akpk — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:33:33 +0000

@Tone

1) use -v attribute along with rsync command.
rsync -varpgo /usr/local/nagios/contacts.cfg stephen@172.0.0.1:~

2) We can redirect the output to another file adding this at the end of any command
> file.txt
>> file1.txt
EG: date > file.txt

By: Tone Williams

Tone Williams — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:06:26 +0000

This was fantastic! I have a couple of questions:

1.) Can it show the percentage completed for each file on-screen?
2.) Is there a way to dump the results into a text file instead of on-screen?
3.) What happens if your SSH connection is accidentally terminated in mid-process? Does the process continue without you?

Thanks.

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:59:40 +0000

No rsync is not real time server file system mirroring tool. It is perfect for making backup and other purposes. You’ve two options here for failback mirroring use DRBD (distributed storage system for the Linux which is like RAID 1, except that it runs over a network between two servers) or use nfs / gfs2 / ofs2 with centralized storage for cluster.

HTH

By: Arie

Arie — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:38:29 +0000

Hello,

Is there an option to synchronize/backup/copy files from one server to another every day at a certain time? Or better yet, does rsync provide on the fly replication, meaning as sson as something changes on one server, the changes are replicated to a second server?

Thank you,

By: Suresh.G

Suresh.G — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:39:06 +0000

I have some folder in the source machine in the format m_d_Y, now from the remote machine i need to pull only last 30 days folders using rsync. Both the source and destination are linux boxes. Any help is appreciated

By: Jozef

Jozef — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:05:52 +0000

We staringrting to switch from solaris to RedHat. I created RedHat intel machine for webserver. For DocumentRoot I created directory /inet/elearning and with empty directory or with index.html (wich I transfer from sparc machine apache started and working but when I rsync all content from sparc I’m getting syntax error at start saying ‘DocumentRoot must be directory’. I see problem with directory format between solaris and redhat. I use rsync syntax:
/usr/bin/rsync -avzp –delete -e /usr/bin/ssh root@sparc-machine:inet/elearning /inet
Is any chance do reformat directory during transfer them or after? On solaris creation block is 512, on redhat probably 4096
Any clue help may help
Thank you

By: Gregory

Gregory — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:25:07 +0000

@Vivek

rsync -e ‘ssh -p 40000′

By: Vivek

Vivek — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:40:49 +0000

What about rsync to different port other than 22 ?

By: viji

viji — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:49:37 +0000

i am using suse linux server and windows xp as client.I am having a network connection here.I need to transfer the database back file from the linux server to my windows xp client.please give some steps/command line arguments to transfer this.