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rsync

The fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool. It operates using deltas and by looking at properties to only update parts of files that have changed, making it incredibly efficient and invaluable as a part of a regular or scheduled backup operation. I have used this tool to ensure local, remote, and external copies of directories are in sync, or to identify what has changed.

Practical Examples

rsync from Host to Dev VM

First obtain the IP address of the VM.

# Tab completion of vm-name works
virsh domifaddr <vm-name>

# TO DO

Then execute the commands either as a bash script or through bash itself to perform the following:

  • -arv archives permissions and unix file properties, recursively, and is verbose about rsync operations
  • --delete will remove any files or data in the dest path that are no longer present in the src path
  • --safe-links will not follow symlinks pointing outside of the tree
  • --exclude='<string>' can be used multiple times to ignore any files and folders with <string> in their path
  • -e "<ssh-args>" can be used to make additional SSH arguments, in the example below, jump across a firewall VM

Ultimately this will sync the folders straysheep-dev.github.io, packer-configs, and ansible-configs to /home/user1/src/ on the remote machine. Without trailing slashes, the folders themselves are sync'd. If you included trailing slashes on the source paths, the contents of the folders would be sync'd. This would put the contents of all three folders into ~/src on the remote machine, instead of keeping them in separate folders.

rsync -arv \
--delete \
--safe-links \
--exclude='.git/' \
--exclude='.cache' \
-e "-J admin@<firewall-vm-ip>:2222" \
./straysheep-dev.github.io \
./packer-configs \
./ansible-configs \
user1@<vm-ip>:/home/user1/src/