Sync two local directories with rsync

The command line application rsync is a very useful utility for synchronizing files and directories between two computers, two harddisks or even two directories on the same file system.

My most common use-case is making backup of my workstation to an external harddrive, essentially from one directory to another as follows.

rsync -av --progress --delete /home/cairne/ /media/cairne/WD

The flags used are: 

-a, --archive    Make identical copy of the file

--delete         Delete files from destination not in the source

-v, --verbose    Increase output message verbosity

--progress       Show progress of synchronization

The trailing slash on the source directory tells rsync to process the contents of the directory, not the directory itself.

Using the --exclude option you can remove items from the process.

rsync -zav --exclude 'target' src/javamail backup@nas.local:/var/backup

If the number of files to exclude is large, the exclusion patterns can instead be read from a file using the --exclude-from option.

The -z option enables compression, which speeds up the process slightly when synchronizing over the network.

Synchronizing large amounts can make your connection slow for other application, so to limit the throughput use the --bwlimit option.

rsync -zav --bwlimit 1000 src/javamail backup@nas.local:/var/backup

This limits the transfer to 1 megabyte per second.

With the option --time-limit you can force rsync to stop the process after a specified amount of minutes since start.

rsync -zav --time-limit 30 src/javamail backup@nas.local:/var/backup

Another option, useful for scheduled operations is the --stop-at option.

rsync -zav --stop-at '2019-12-28T06:45' src/linux backup@nas.local:/backup

This option will stop rsync at 6:45 in the morning of 28th December if it is still running at the time. Useful for large jobs spanning several hours.

By Andreas • Thu, 13 Dec 2018