It’s good to keep backups, especially of servers in remote data centers using old hard drives.<\/p>\n
rsync -vaEz --progress user@remote:\/path \/local\/path<\/tt><\/p>\n
In my case, I’m doing it as root and just copying \/, although, in hindsight, I think I should have used the –exclude=… option… It doesn’t make any sense to me to “back up” \/proc or \/dev, \/tmp is iffy, and \/mnt is usually not desired.<\/p>\n
A few notes: I use –progress because otherwise it wants to just sit there, which is irritating.<\/p>\n
-a is archive, which actually maps to a slew of options. -z enables compression. Note that this may or may not be desirable: on a fast link with a slower machine, this may do more harm than good. There’s also a –bwlimit argument that takes KB\/sec as an argument. (–bwlimit=100 would be 100KB\/sec, or 800kbps.)<\/p>\n
Using rsync for backups is nothing new, but it’s still not used as widely as it could be. A seemingly-common option is to create a huge backup with tar, compress it, and then download the massive file. rsync saves you the overhead of making ludicrously-large backup files, and also lets you just download what’s changed, as opposed to downloading a complete image every time. It’s taking forever the first time, since I’m downloading about 40GB of content. But next time, it’ll be substantially quicker.<\/p>\n
With backups this easy, everyone should be making backups frequently!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s good to keep backups, especially of servers in remote data centers using old hard drives. rsync -vaEz –progress user@remote:\/path \/local\/path In my case, I’m doing it as root and just copying \/, although, in hindsight, I think I should … Continue reading