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)

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    14 hours 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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      23·
      13 hours ago

      For versioning/retention, just use snapshots in whatever filesystem you’re using (you are using a proper filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS, right?).

      • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        How does that get sent over rsync though? Wouldn’t you need snapshots on the remote destination server?

        Why not just use a backup utility instead?

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          9 hours ago

          Yes, async copies files to the remote server, the remote server takes regular snapshots.

          Why not just use a backup utility instead?

          What is that utility providing that snapshots + rsync doesn’t. If rsync + snapshots is sufficient, why overcomplicate it with a backup utility?

          • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2·
            9 hours ago

            The main things that come to mind are you have to test/monitor 2 seperate actions instead of 1, and restores of single files could be more difficult since you need to login to the backup server, restore the file from a snapshot, then also copy that file back to your PC.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1·
              4 hours ago

              My point is, how often do you actually need to restore from backup? If it’s frequent, consider a dedicated tool for whatever that thing is. If it’s infrequent, it’ll probably easier to just learn how to do it every five years or whatever.

              If you like borg/restic/etc, by all means, use it.

              My point is that most people probably don’t need it. Snapshots are something you set up once, and you should probably use them even if you’re using something like borg for any files that aren’t covered (e.g. config files on the server). Rsync is also something you set up once, and checking it is the same as any other service.

  • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    But if you’re working with Linux you’re going to need to know it.

    Nope. I never have needed to know it. I only ever used it because I was either curious to know how to use it or because it was more convenient than other solutions. But scp is basically just as convenient.

      • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        If you want to use it for backups, there are other solutions, so you still don’t need to use it or know it. You can use something else. That’s my only point. 🤷‍♂️

        And “really bad” is all relative. If you are only backing up your home drive with documents or whatever, copying a few unnecessary gigabytes over a LAN connection isn’t too bad at all. But scp isn’t what you should be using for backups anyway. I only used rsync for file transfer…

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          9 hours ago

          I use rsync for all kinda of things:

          • deploying static files to a public webserver (blog or whatever)
          • backups - scheduled systems/cron task w/ SSH key
          • copying stuff from a USB drive

          I only really use scp if the system doesn’t already have rsync.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1·
              6 hours ago

              Sure, but you should probably be aware of what it is and what it does. It’s incredibly common and will be referenced in a ton of documentation for Linux server stuff.

              • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                15 minutes ago

                You won’t need to unless you run a server in that case. 👍 But the only condition here was “working with Linux”.

                Like I said, I’ve been using Linux at home and for work for over a decade, maybe 15+ years, never once did I need to use rsync or know what it is.

                That being said, it was convenient when I used it, but never did I need it.

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    6·
    23 hours ago

    I never thought of it as slow. More like very reliable. I dont need my data to move fast, I need it to be copied with 100% reliability.

      • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 hours ago

        If I connect to the same server via my own VPN I don’t have the disconnections, so I’m thinking it’s tailscale cutting connections after too much traffic. But connecting via tailscale is so much more convenient 😢

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    43·
    3 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
      15·
      2 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
        71·
        2 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
          3·
          2 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·
            22 hours 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.

            • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
              0·
              18 hours ago

              I originally thought it was one of my drives in my RAID1 array that was failing, but I noticed copying data was yielding btrfs corruption errors on both drives that could not be fixed with a scrub and I was also getting btrfs corruption errors on the root volume as well. I figured it would be quite an odd coincidence if my main SSD and 2 hard disks all went bad and I happened upon an article talking about how corrupt data can also occur if the RAM is bad. I also ran SMART tests and everything came back with a clean bill of health. So, I installed and booted into Memtester86+ and it immediately started showing errors on the single 16Gi stick I was using. I happened to have a spare stick that was a different brand, and that one passed the memory test with flying colors. After that, all the corruption errors went away and everything has been working perfectly ever since.

              I will also say that legacy file systems like ext4 with no checksums wouldn’t even complain about corrupt data. I originally had ext4 on my main drive and at one point thought my OS install went bad, so I reinstalled with btrfs on top of LUKS and saw I was getting corruption errors on the main drive at that point, so it occurred to me that 3 different drives could not have possibly had a hardware failure and something else must be going on. I was also previously using ext4 and mdadm for my RAID1 and migrated it to btrfs a while back. I was previously noticing as far back as a year ago that certain installers, etc. that previously worked no longer worked, which happened infrequently and didn’t really register with me as a potential hardware problem at the time, but I think the RAM was actually progressively going bad for quite a while. btrfs with regular scrubs would’ve made it abundantly clear much sooner that I had files getting corrupted and that something was wrong.

              So, I’m quite convinced at this point that RAID is not a backup, even with the abilities of btrfs to self-heal, and simply copying data elsewhere is not a backup, because something like bad RAM in both cases can destroy data during the copying process, whereas older snapshots in the cloud will survive such a hardware failure. Older data backed up that wasn’t coped with faulty RAM may be fine as well, but you’re taking a chance that a recent update may overwrite good data with bad data. I was previously using Rclone for most backups while testing Restic with daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots for a small subset of important data the last few months. After finding some data that was only recoverable in a previous Restic snapshot, I’ve since switched to using Restic exclusively for anything important enough for cloud backups. I was mainly concerned about the space requirements of keeping historical snapshots, and I’m still working on tweaking retention policies and taking separate snapshots of different directories with different retention policies according risk tolerance for each directory I’m backing up. For some things, I think even btrfs local snapshots would suffice with the understanding that it’s to reduce recovery time, but isn’t really a backup . However, any irreplaceable data really needs monthly Restic snapshots in the cloud. I suppose if don’t have something like btrfs scrubs to alert you that you have a problem, even snapshots from months ago may have an unnoticed problem.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Veeam for image/block based backups of Windows, Linux and VMs.
    syncthing for syncing smaller files across devices.

    Thank you very much.

  • mesa@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    Ive personally used rsync for backups for about…15 years or so? Its worked out great. An awesome video going over all the basics and what you can do with it.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      It works fine if all you need is transfer, my issue with it it’s just not efficient. If you want a “time travel” feature, your only option is to duplicate data. Differential backups, compression, and encryption for off-site ones is where other tools shine.

      • suicidaleggroll@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        If you want a “time travel” feature, your only option is to duplicate data.

        Not true. Look at the --link-dest flag. Encryption, sure, rsync can’t do that, but incremental backups work fine and compression is better handled at the filesystem level anyway IMO.

        • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          Isn’t that creating hardlinks between source and dest? Hard links only work on the same drive. And I’m not sure how that gives you “time travel”, as in, browsing snapshots or file states at the different times you ran rsync.

          Edit: ah the hard link is between dest and the link-dest argument, makes more sense.

          I wouldn’t bundle fs and backup compression in the same bucket, because they have vastly different reqs. Backup compression doesn’t need to be optimized for fast decompression.

      • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.deEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Agree. It’s neat for file transfers and simple one-shot backups, but if you’re looking for a proper backup solution then other tools/services have advanced virtually every aspect of backups so much it pretty much always makes sense to use one of those instead.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        That would only matter if it’s lots of small files, right? And after the initial sync, you’d have very few files, no?

        Rsync is designed for incremental syncs, which is exactly what you want in a backup solution. If your multithreaded alternative doesn’t do a diff, rsync will win on larger data sets that don’t have rapid changes.

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I used to use rsnapshot, which is a thin wrapper around rsync to make it incremental, but moved to restic and never looked back. Much easier and encrypted by default.

  • ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    rsnapshot is a script for the purpose of repeatedly creating deduplicated copies (hardlinks) for one or more directories. You can chose how many hourly, daily, weekly,… copies you’d like to keep and it removes outdated copies automatically. It wraps rsync and ssh (public key auth) which need to be configured before.

  • surph_ninja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    2 days ago

    Use borg/borgmatic for your backups. Use rsync to send your differentials to your secondary & offsite backup storage.