Johnny Matthews | Basic Rsync example

Rsync is a command-line tool that makes copy files to and from a remote server super easy. It's also great for keeping backup folders and external drive in sync with each other. This was written on 10th of March 2021.

I distro hop between Ubuntu-based Linux distributions fairly frequently. This means I’m often copy data to and from my backups and onto my laptop. I generally use Rsync for this, but I usually forget the command and have to find that one particular website that has the exact collection of arguments and flags that I use. To stop me having to rummage around the internet every time I need to backup something, I’m putting that command here.

rsync --archive --verbose --size-only --update ~/Music /media/johnny/removable-drive

I think the trailing slashes on those two paths are important. The rest of the flags are fairly simple:

Flag Purpose
--archive Bundles a bunch of other commonly used flags into one.
--verbose Print the output to the terminal so we can see what we’re doing.
--size-only When comparing files, only check the size of the file. Ignore the timestamp. This gets around some issues with external drives re-stamping the timestamp when copying over.
--update Only copies over files that don’t exist in the destination folder, or if the source file has been modified more recently than the destination file.