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)
I was planning to use rsync to ship several TB of stuff from my old NAS to my new one soon. Since we’re already talking about rsync, I guess I may as well ask if this is right way to go?
It depends
rsyncis fine, but to clarify a little further…If you think you’ll stop the transfer and want it to resume (and some data might have changed), then yep,
rsyncis best.But, if you’re just doing a 1-off bulk transfer in a single run, then you could use other tools like
xcopy/scpor - if you’ve mounted the remote NAS at a local mount point - just plain oldcpThe reason for that is that
rsynchas to work out what’s at the other end for each file, so it’s doing some back & forwards communications each time which as someone else pointed out can load the CPU and reduce throughput.(From memory, I think Raspberry Pi don’t handle large transfers over
scpwell… I seem to recall a buffer gets saturated and the throughput drops off after a minute or so)Also, on a local network, there’s probably no point in using encryption or compression options - esp. for photos / videos / music… you’re just loading the CPU again to work out that it can’t compress any further.
It’s just a one-off transfer, I’m not planning to stop the transfer, and it’s my media library, so nothing should change, but I figured something resumable is a good idea for a transfer that’s going to take 12+ hours, in case there’s an unplanned stop.
One thing I forgot to mention:
rsynchas an option to preserve file timestamps, so if that’s important for your files, then thst might also be useful… without checking, the other commands probably have that feature, but I don’t recall at the moment.rsync -Prvt <source> <destination>might be something to try, leave for a minute, stop and retry … that’ll prove it’s all working.Oh… and make sure you get the source and destination paths correct with a trailing
/(or not), otherwise you’ll get all your files copied to an extra subfolder (or not)I couldn’t tell you if it’s the right way but I used it on my Rpi4 to sync 4tb of stuff from my Plex drive to a backup and set a script up to have it check/mirror daily. Took a day and a half to copy and now it syncs in minutes tops when there’s new data
yes, it’s the right way to go.
rsync over ssh is the best, and works as long as rsync is installed on both systems.
On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like
rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.