A Tutorial on Using rsync

Introduction

Rsync is a wonderful little utility that's amazingly easy to set up on your machines. Rather than have a scripted FTP session, or some other form of file transfer script -- rsync copies only the diffs of files that have actually changed, compressed and through ssh if you want to for security. That's a mouthful -- but what it means is:

• Diffs - Only actual changed pieces of files are transferred, rather than the whole file. This makes updates faster, especially over slower links like modems. FTP would transfer the entire file, even if only one byte changed.
• Compression - The tiny pieces of diffs are then compressed on the fly, further saving you file transfer time and reducing the load on the network.
• Secure Shell - The security concious of you out there would like this, and you should all be using it. The stream from rsync is passed through the ssh protocol to encrypt your session instead of rsh, which is also an option (and required if you don't use ssh - enable it in your /etc/inet.d and restart your inet daemon if you disabled it for security).

Rsync is rather versatile as a backup/mirroring tool, offering many features above and beyond the above. I personally use it to synchronize Website trees from staging to production servers and to backup key areas of the filesystems both automatically through cron and by a CGI script. Here are some other key features of rsync:

• Support for copying links, devices, owners, groups and permissions
• Exclude and exclude-from options similar to GNU tar
• A CVS exclude mode for ignoring the same files that CVS would ignore
• Does not require root privileges
• Pipelining of file transfers to minimize latency costs
• Support for anonymous or authenticated rsync servers (ideal for mirroring)

How does it work?

Setting up a Server

Using Rsync Itself

Now on to actually using, or initiating an rsync transfer with rsync itself. It's the same binary as the daemon, just without the "--daemon" flag. It's simplicity is a virtue. I'll start with a commandline that I use in a script to synchronize a Web tree below.

rsync --verbose--progress --stats --compress --rsh=/usr/local/bin/ssh--recursive --times --perms --links --delete \--exclude "*bak" --exclude "*~" \/www/* webserver:simple_path_name

Let's go through it one line at a time. The first line calls rsync itself and specifies the options "verbose," progress" and "stats" so that you can see what's going on this first time around. The "compress" and "rsh" options specify that you want your stream compressed and to send it through ssh (remember from above?) for security's sake.

The next line specifies how rsync itself operates on your files. You're telling rsync here to go through your source pathname recursively with "recursive" and to preserve the file timestamps and permissions with "times" and "perms." Copy symbolic links with "links" and delete things from the remote rsync server that are also deleted locally with "delete."

Now we have a line where there's quite a bit of power and flexibility. You can specify GNU tar-like include and exclude patterns here. In this example, I'm telling rsync to ignore some backup files that are common in this Web tree ("*.bak" and "*~" files). You can put whatever you want to match here, suited to your specific needs. You can leave this line out and rsync will copy all your files as they are locally to the remote machine. Depends on what you want.

Finally, the line that specifies the source pathname, the remote rsync machine and rsync "path." The first part "/www/*" specifies where on my local filesytem I want rsync to grab the files from for transmission to the remote rsync server. The next word, "webserver" should be the DNS name or IP address of your rsync server. It can be "w.x.y.z" or "rsync.mydomain.com" or even just "webserver" if you have a nickname defined in your /etc/hosts file, as I do here. The single colon specifies that you want the whole mess sent through your ssh tunnel, as opposed to the regular rsh tunnel. This is an important point to pay attention to! If you use two colons, then despite the specification of ssh on the commandline previously, you'll still go through rsh. Ooops. The last "www" in that line is the rsync "path" that you set up on the server as in the sample above.

Yes, that's it! If you run the above command on your local rsync client, then you will transfer the entire "/www/*" tree to the remote "webserver" machine except backup files, preserving file timestamps and permissions -- compressed and secure -- with visual feedback on what's happening.

Note that in the above example, I used GNU style long options so that you can see what the commandline is all about. You can also use abbreviations, single letters -- to do the same thing. Try running rsync with the "--help" option alone and you can see what syntax and options are available.

Rsync on the Net