Questions with rsync

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Thu Jun 4 01:05:23 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 10:05 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 03:02 -0700, GMS S wrote:
> > Will this command do the job for backup?
> > 
> > rsync -vpa / /home/user/backup
> 
> Er, isn't this recursive?

What I meant to say was "isn't this an infinite loop?" The entire
filesystem rooted at / is being copied into one of its subtrees.

The answer is that rsync is clever enough to avoid this (I tried it on a
test directory), but I'm not sure if I'd like to rely on this behaviour
as it doesn't appear to be documented.

My personal preference is rsnapshot, which does everything people have
been claiming for their own personal rsync scripts (it also uses rsync
of course), but is actually maintained in the standard repos.

poc




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