Rsync (Remote Sync): 10 Practical Examples of Rsync Command in Linux

Rsync (Remote Sync) is a most commonly used command for copying and synchronizing files and directories remotely as well as locally in Linux/Unix systems. With the help of rsync command you can copy and synchronize your data remotely and locally across directories, across disks and networks, perform data backups and mirroring between two Linux machines.

Rsync Local and Remote File Synchronization

This article explains 10 basic and advanced usage of the rsync command to transfer your files remotely and locally in Linux based machines. You don’t need to be root user to run rsync command.

Some advantages and features of Rsync command

1. It efficiently copies and sync files to or from a remote system.
2. Supports copying links, devices, owners, groups and permissions.
3. It’s faster than scp (Secure Copy) because rsync uses remote-update protocol which allows to transfer just the differences between two sets of files. First time, it copies the whole content of a file or a directory from source to destination but from next time, it copies only the changed blocks and bytes to the destination.
4. Rsync consumes less bandwidth as it uses compression and decompression method while sending and receiving data both ends.

Basic syntax of rsync command

# rsync options source destination

Some common options used with rsync commands

1. -v : verbose
2. -r : copies data recursively (but don’t preserve timestamps and permission while transferring data
3. -a : archive mode, archive mode allows copying files recursively and it also preserves symbolic links, file permissions, user & group ownerships and timestamps
4. -z : compress file data
5. -h : human-readable, output numbers in a human-readable format

Suggested Read: How to Sync Files/Directories Using Rsync with Non-standard SSH Port

Install rsync in your Linux machine

We can install rsync package with the help of following command.

# yum install rsync (On Red Hat based systems)
# apt-get install rsync (On Debian based systems)

1. Copy/Sync Files and Directory Locally

Copy/Sync a File on a Local Computer

This following command will sync a single file on a local machine from one location to another location. Here in this example, a file name backup.tar needs to be copied or synced to /tmp/backups/ folder.

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