Code Quest

Backing up with RSYNC

29 Feb 2012

There are basically two types of people in this world, those who do backup and those who don’t. And I finally realized I was on the latter type. I know this has happened before where I accidentally delete my file and search everywhere try to get the software running to get the data back. But no use, once the data is erased it’s hard to get the data back, so I finally surrendered myself to the the backup tools. And with the decreasing cost of hard drive space in this era. I think it would be a good idea to do backup. But again concern such as Data Pollution, Data Redundancy should be taken into consideration while doing backup, otherwise else those tools will make your life more miserable when you have data but you can’t search for the file that you have. So I gave it a try on RSync. From the man page of RSync,

Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon. It offers a large number of options that control every aspect of its behavior and per-mit very flexible specification of the set of files to be copied. It is famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination. Rsync is widely used for backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday use. Rsync finds files that need to be transferred using a “quick check” algorithm (by default) that looks for files that have changed in size or in last-modified time. Any changes in the other preserved attributes (as requested by options) are made on the desti-nation file directly when the quick check indicates that the file’s data does not need to be updated.

The best thing about Rsync is it’s “Delta-Transfer Algorithm” using which both the problems of data redudancy and data polution can be easily solved.And Rsync provides such a easy interface for new users and also provides versatility for advanced users by providing various sets of options.

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