You might not even like rsync. Yeah it’s old. Yeah it’s slow. But if you’re working with Linux you’re going to need to know it.

In this video I walk through my favorite everyday flags for rsync.

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Here’s a companion blog post, where I cover a bit more detail: https://vkc.sh/everyday-rsync

Also, @BreadOnPenguins made an awesome rsync video and you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifQI5uD6VQ

Lastly, I left out all of the ssh setup stuff because I made a video about that and the blog post goes into a smidge more detail. If you want to see a video covering the basics of using SSH, I made one a few years ago and it’s still pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKsdbjzBcc

Chapters:
1:18 Invoking rsync
4:05 The --delete flag for rsync
5:30 Compression flag: -z
6:02 Using tmux and rsync together
6:30 but Veronica… why not use (insert shiny object here)

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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    5 hours ago

    It depends

    rsync is fine, but to clarify a little further…

    If you think you’ll stop the transfer and want it to resume (and some data might have changed), then yep, rsync is best.

    But, if you’re just doing a 1-off bulk transfer in a single run, then you could use other tools like xcopy / scp or - if you’ve mounted the remote NAS at a local mount point - just plain old cp

    The reason for that is that rsync has to work out what’s at the other end for each file, so it’s doing some back & forwards communications each time which as someone else pointed out can load the CPU and reduce throughput.

    (From memory, I think Raspberry Pi don’t handle large transfers over scp well… I seem to recall a buffer gets saturated and the throughput drops off after a minute or so)

    Also, on a local network, there’s probably no point in using encryption or compression options - esp. for photos / videos / music… you’re just loading the CPU again to work out that it can’t compress any further.