… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog
rsync is a very popular and comes included on all Macs and is available for windows and linux. It lets you efficiently backup files and folders over SSH and it is a great way to mirror data off to Strongspace.
However, it is one of those unix-y programs which has a MILLION different options to twiddle and can be rather intimidating. I thought a basic post on how to use rsync with with Strongspace in the most general fashion would be useful.
All you need to remember
rsync -avz [source_path] [destination:destination_path]
This is the basic command structure with a handful of basic options attached: compress the data, verbose output, recurse the source folders and preserve timestamps and user ids.
Backup your Mac Desktop Strongspace:
rsync -avz ~/Desktop username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home
One small bit to note is the difference between typing ~/Desktop and ~/Desktop/ – the later way does not create a Desktop folder in Strongspace but sends all the contents of the Desktop into your destination. It can be a bit messy if that wasn’t your intention.
Backup iPhoto to Strongspace:
rsync -avz ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home
Here is a simple example that sends the entire contents of your iPhoto library up to Strongspace.
Making it simpler
Let’s admit, this isn’t a short command:
rsync -avz ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home
but you can shorten it down to this:
rsync ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library ss:/strongspace/username/home
First, do yourself the favor and setup a SSH alias and, if you want, password-less login. To make life even easier you can default rsync options by using a bash alias. Open Terminal and paste this line:
echo 'alias rsync="rsync -avz"' >> .profile
Now the next time you open a new Terminal window rsync will have those options set by default.
Happy sync’ing!