Posts Tagged ‘server ip’

Use rsync to copy from files from destination host to source host (rsync reverse copy) / few words on rsync

Monday, January 9th, 2012

I've recently had to set up a backup system to synchronize backup archive files between two remote servers and as I do usually with this situation I just set up a crontab job to periodically execute rsync to copy data from source server to the destination server . Copying SRC to DEST is the default behaviour rsync uses, however in this case I had to copy from the destination server to the source server host (in other words sync files the reversely.

The usual way to copy with rsync via SSH (from SRC to DEST) is using a cmd line like:

debian:~$ /usr/bin/rsync -avz -e ssh backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/my-directory .

Where the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is my remote server IP with which files are synched.
According to rsync manual, the proposed docs SYNOPSIS is in the format;
Local: rsync [OPTION…] SRC… [DEST

Obviusly the default way to use rsync is to copy source to destination which I used until now, but in this case I had to the other way around and copy files from a destination host to the source server. It was logical that swapping the SRC and DEST would complete my required task. Anyways I consulted with some rsync gurus in irc.freenode.net , just to make sure it is proper to just swap the SRC, DEST arguments.
I was told this is possible, so I swapped args;

debian:~$ /usr/bin/rsync -avz -e ssh . backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/my-directory
...

Surprisingly this worked 😉 Anyways I was adviced by by a good guy nick named scheel , that putting -e ssh to command line is generally unnecessery except if there is no some uncommon used SSH port over which the data is transferred. An example case in which -e 'ssh is necessery would be if transferring via lets say SSH port 1234;

rsync -avz -e 'ssh -p1234' /source user@host:/dest

In all other cases omitting '-e ssh' is better as '-e ssh' is rsync default. Therefore my final swapped line I put in cron to copy from a destinatio to source host with rsync looked like so:

05 03 2 * * /usr/bin/ionice -c 3 /usr/bin/rsync -avz my-directory backup-user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/backup-user/ >/dev/null 2>&1