Transfering a Folder Recursively to Another Machine With rsync (Push or Pull)
By rsync is an awesome program built into Linux to copy files. It can do both pushing and pulling of files:
Pushing Files
sudo rsync [OPTION...] [USER@]HOST:SRC... [DEST]
Example of Pushing a Directory Recursively:
sudo rsync -rt /var/www/html/coolFiles timmanz@192.168.1.86:/home/mydir/InterestingStuff
Pulling Files
You can also initiate the transfer on the receiving machine. The syntax is as follows:
sudo rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [USER@]HOST:DEST
Example of Pushing a Directory Recursively:
sudo rsync -rt timmanz@192.168.1.86:/home/mydir/InterestingStuff /var/www/html/coolFiles
rsync Options:
These are some of our favorite rsync options. Read more on the man page.
-v, –verbose increase verbosity
-q, –quiet suppress non-error messages
–no-motd suppress daemon-mode MOTD (see caveat)
-c, –checksum skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size
-a, –archive archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
–no-OPTION turn off an implied OPTION (e.g. –no-D)
-r, –recursive recurse into directories
-R, –relative use relative path names
–no-implied-dirs don’t send implied dirs with –relative
-b, –backup make backups (see –suffix & –backup-dir)
–backup-dir=DIR make backups into hierarchy based in DIR
–suffix=SUFFIX backup suffix (default ~ w/o –backup-dir)
-u, –update skip files that are newer on the receiver
–inplace update destination files in-place
–append append data onto shorter files
–append-verify –append w/old data in file checksum
-d, –dirs transfer directories without recursing
-l, –links copy symlinks as symlinks
-L, –copy-links transform symlink into referent file/dir
–copy-unsafe-links only “unsafe” symlinks are transformed
–safe-links ignore symlinks that point outside the tree
-k, –copy-dirlinks transform symlink to dir into referent dir
-K, –keep-dirlinks treat symlinked dir on receiver as dir
-H, –hard-links preserve hard links
-p, –perms preserve permissions
-E, –executability preserve executability
–chmod=CHMOD affect file and/or directory permissions
-A, –acls preserve ACLs (implies -p)
-X, –xattrs preserve extended attributes
-o, –owner preserve owner (super-user only)
-g, –group preserve group
–devices preserve device files (super-user only)
–specials preserve special files
-D same as –devices –specials
-t, –times preserve modification times
-O, –omit-dir-times omit directories from –times
–super receiver attempts super-user activities
–fake-super store/recover privileged attrs using xattrs
-S, –sparse handle sparse files efficiently
-n, –dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made
-W, –whole-file copy files whole (w/o delta-xfer algorithm)