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Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).

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  • Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's is rsync(1).

    It's one of the key elements in my podcast listening (more on that to come later this month), where my podcatcher pulls down podcasts into a backlog tree structure, and I rsync the whole thing to my phone for listening. It also undergirds my blog deployment, building in Nikola (still gotta find some time to switch that to my custom Makefile driven build process) and then rsync'ing the output/ tree up to my web-server.

    And last night our teen wanted our family photo website content's pictures for a school project, so I was able to rsync the latest copy of them to a backup USB drive that he could browse offline.

    It's reliable and does a particular job (keeping two directory trees in sync) very well. Yes, ZFS send/receive is more efficient if both sides support it and they're whole datasets, but that's not always the case.

    Also, since I use bash as my shell, the "^" substitution makes it easy to issue something like

    $ rsync -n -avr $SRC $DEST

    and if it looks good, use

    $ ^-n

    to remove the dry-run flag and run it for real.

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