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. Su...

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.

Support the channel:
https://patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
https://ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
https://thestopbits.bandcamp.com/

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)

  • mistermodal@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Because it’s not shiny and new? I think the simple stuff works great with the shiny stuff. Command line tools are great for weaving in NTFY pings to our fancy pocket communicators with all kinds of information.

  • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    Why videos? I feel like an old man yelling at clouds every time something that sounds interesting is presented in a fucking video. Videos are so damn awful. They take time, I need audio and I can’t copy&paste. Why have they become the default for things that should’ve been a blog post?

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution. But it is one of the best transfer/archiving solutions.

    Yes, it is INCREDIBLY powerful and is often 90% of what people actually want/need. But to be an actual backup solution you still need infrastructure around that. Bare minimum is a crontab. But if you are actually backing something up (not just copying it to a local directory) then you need some logging/retry logic on top of that.

    At which point you are building your own borg, as it were. Which, to be clear, is a great thing to do. But… backups are incredibly important and it is very much important to understand what a backup actually needs to be.

    • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.

      Yeah, if you want to use rsync specifically for backups, you’re probably better-off using something like rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently, and drive it from something like backupninja, which will run the task periodically and notify you if it fails.

      rsync: one-way synchronization

      unison: bidirectional synchronization

      git: synchronization of text files with good interactive merging.

      rdiff-backup: rsync-based backups. I used to use this and moved to restic, as the backupninja target for rdiff-backup has kind of fallen into disrepair.

      That doesn’t mean “don’t use rsync”. I mean, rsync’s a fine tool. It’s just…not really a backup program on its own.

      • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Having a synced copy elsewhere is not an adequate backup and snapshots are pretty important. I recently had RAM go bad and my most recent backups had corrupt data, but having previous snapshots saved the day.

        • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          Don’t understand the downvotes. This is the type of lesson people have learned from losing data and no sense in learning it the hard way yourself.

          • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            How would you pin down something like this? If it happened to me, I expect I just wouldn’t understand what’s going on.

  • calliope@retrolemmy.comEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    Tangentially, I don’t see people talk about rclone a lot, which is like rsync for cloud storage.

    It’s awesome for moving things from one provider to another, for example.

    • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      It’s fine. But yes in the Linux space. We tend to want to host ourselves. Not have to trust some administrator of some cloud we don’t know/trust.

      • calliope@retrolemmy.comEnglish
        1·
        12 days ago

        It has been remarkably useful! I keep trying to tell people about it but apparently I am just their main use case or something.

        I would have loved it when I was using Samba to share files on my local network decades ago. It’s like a Swiss Army knife!

  • atk007@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Rsnapshot. It uses rsync, but provides snapshot management and multiple backup versioning.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Surely restic or borg would be better for backups?

    Rsync can send files and not delete stuff, but there’s no versioning or retention settings.