Linux System Administration

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Chapter 11: Backing Up Data

vacation-request.sxw

15198 100% 154.60kB/s 0:00:00 (5, 87.5% of 16)

sent 185942 bytes received 136 bytes 24810.40 bytes/sec

total size is 210691 speedup is 1.13

amy@desk12:~$

rsync tells us that it is considering 14 files. It backs up only five files, though, because

the other nine files are already on the backup server and have not been changed. This

output shows the progress output as 100 percent when the files are complete and

indicates how long each transfer took. On a high-speed LAN the transfer time will

usually be less than one second for small or medium-sized files. On slower connec-

tions or for very large files, you will see a progress status that gives the size and per-

centage transferred so far, and an estimate of time to completion.

Listing Files on the Backup Server

rsync can also provide a list of the files on the backup server. This is useful for verify-

ing whether new and important files are really there, as well as for finding files that

need to be restored because they’ve been lost or because the user needs to recover an

old version.

To get this listing, omit the

options and destination arguments. Here’s a simple bash

script that obtains the desired results:

#!/bin/bash

dest=server1

user=$(whoami)

cd || exit 1

rsync "${user}@${dest}:." | more

Running this script produces results similar to the following:

amy@desk12:~$ ./backlist

Password:

drwx------ 4096 ...