rsync

[Brian Cluff]

If you are backing up locally you will want to do things a little 
different size as:

rsync -auW  /sort/directory /dest/directory/

You will want to skip the -z option and the corresponding 
--compress-level option.  Since you are doing copying everything locally 
that will only cause the machine to compress and immediately decompress 
every file that is copied wasting a ton of CPU/power.

The other thing you will want to do is use the -W flag, that tells the 
machine to copy whole files instead of looking for what has changed 
between the documents.  That way it can look at the time and/or size and 
if it's changed it will just copy the whole file.  Without that flag it 
would read through both the source and destination file and then just 
copy the differences by writing a whole new file, so with the -W (whole 
file) flag the machine just reads/writes the file once and is a lot more 
efficient/faster.

This can also be a good flag to set on fast networks since it can be a 
lot faster just to re-copy the whole file than it is to have the hard 
drive reading the file multiple times.

The progress flag is very nice, but unless you are planning on closely 
monitoring your copy, I would skip it as I've found that it tends to 
slow down the transfer... or at least make it feel that way, like a 
watched pot never boils :)

On your slash at end end question.  A slash at the end tends to mean 
that you want to put the source files/dirs into that directory and a 
destination without a slash usually means that you want to rename your 
source file/directory to that destination file/dir name.

Lastly the -h option gives you the sizes in easily readable terms or in 
other words, instead of just giving you the size in bytes it will give 
you size that look like 100K 2.4M 1.8G

Brian Cluff

On 09/20/2015 05:34 AM, Michael Havens wrote:
> I know how to use rsync (sorta) to backup a disk and go between remote
> machines. With my current incarnation of the os I'm not so worried about
> backing up the whole system as I am a directory (and all of the
> directories under it) nor copying between remote machines. The directory
> is the 'Documents' directory. Would I:
>
> rsync -aquz --compress-level=5 /home/bmike1/Documents /media/bmike1/USB
> DISK/
> --
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
>
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