commandliners

I did not know that rsync had the resume capability till last week when I had to transfer almost 200GB between two servers with no good connection. I think some context is needed here: My company has two servers in two different cities where the backups are stored. There is a daily syncronization between the backup tree between the servers. That is, a cron task that calls a script that basically runs rsync.

Due to the bad connection, I have had to add the -P option to the rsync command so that the command run by the cron task is:

$ rsync -rPtz -e ssh /local_backup_path/ remote_host:/remote_backup_path/

The -e ssh tells rsync to use a ssh client instead of rsh. The -z option compresses the file. -t preserves time attributes and the -P option resumes incomplete file transfers.

If you run this command from the command line you can use the --progress option, that will show you a progress bar during transfer. Very useful with large files.

I hope this saves you some time ;)