Backing up snapshots with rsync

Backing up data is something that needs to be done regularly. In addition to local backups, we may need to back up data to or from remote locations. The rsync command synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing transfer time. The advantages of rsync over the cp command are that rsync compares modification dates and will only copy the files that are newer, rsync supports data transfer across remote machines, and rsync supports compression and encryption.

How to do it...

1. To copy a source directory to a destination, use the following command:

$ rsync -av source_path destination_path

Consider this example:

$ rsync -av /home/slynux/data 
        [email protected]:/home/backups/data

In the preceding command:

• -a stands for archiving
• -v (verbose) prints the details or progress on stdout

The preceding command will recursively copy all the files from the source path to the destination path. The source and destination paths can be either...