On 2016-10-17 Justin Richard wrote:
I'm about to setup Rsync to transfer files to a backup machine.
So I'm looking around the internet for people's best practices and opinions. I'm noticing that many of the admins are doing things in a combo of GUI in desktop and cmd line opposed to strictly cmd line in server.
If you're talking about whether to use rsync at the command line vs finding a gui for it, it's best to learn the command line. If you're trying to do backups, try using these options:
*** see notes below before running this! It can delete your files! ***
rsync -vaxHAX /source/ user@desthost:/dest/
The only tricky part is figuring out if you want to transfer source dir and below or the contents of source/ (with a slash). I find it easier to always use a trailing slash on source/.
But you don't even need to really be an expert or remember the slash, just make sure you specify --dry-run (or -n) and look at what rsync is doing as a "dry run" (no files are actually copied/deleted) and ensure it's all okie dokie before taking out the --dry-run to actually do the backup. Once you're sure it's all good, put your command line in a script or alias (or cron) and use that to run it whenever you need it.