Tuncay Sahin

ICT Engineer | Docent ICT & Trainer

This tutorial will help you to sync data between two (web) servers with “Rsync“ for example to minimize/eliminate downtime/data loss of your web servers.
Rsync (Remote Sync) is a command tool to copy and synchronize data locally across directories, across disks and remotely across systems to perform data backups and mirroring between two Linux systems.

The main advantages of Rsync is:

  • Speed: Initially copies the whole content between local and remote system. Next time, only those bytes and blocks of data that have changed.
  • Rsync uses compression and decompression method while transferring data which consumes less bandwidth.
  • Rsync has the ability to check and delete those files and directories at backup server that have been deleted from the main web server.
  • It takes care of permissions, ownerships and special attributes while copying data remotely.
  • It also supports SSH protocol to transfer data in an encrypted manner so that you will be assured that all data is safe.

Install Rsync Tool

Rysync package must be installed on local system and on remote system as well.

yum install rsync

 

Rsysncd listens the defaults TCP port 873

RSync Examples

Syntax:

rsysnc [options] source destination

Synchronizes two directory on local computer

rsync -avzh /root/rpmpkgs /tmp/backups/

Synchronize local host to remote host

rsync -avz /home/userx/ remoteuser@remoteserver:/share/rsysnctest/

Synchronize remote host to local host

rsync -avzh remoteuser@remoteserver:/home/userx /tmp/backup

Synchronize remote to local host

rsync -avz remoteuser@remoteserver:/share/rsysnctest/ /home/userx/

Synchronize remote host
to local host with SSH

rsync -avzhe ssh remoteuser@remoteserver:/var/www/ /var/www

Show Progress While
Transferring Data with rsync

rsync -avzhe ssh –progress /home/rpmpkgs remoteuser@remoteserver:/root/rpmpkgs

Set Bandwidth Limit

rsync –bwlimit=100 -avzhe ssh  /var/lib/rpm/ remoteuser@remoteserver:/root/tmprpm/

RSync options

-a, –archive archive mode it preserves owner and groups, it preserve timestamp, symbolic links, permission, recursive mode.
-r, –recursive recurse into directories
-p, –perms preserve permissions
-z, –compress compress file data during the transfer
-n, –dry-run show what would have been transferred
-v, –verbose Verbose
-e ssh Rsync Over SSH, perform data transfer in secured connection with encryption

Schedule Cron To Automate RSync

As we are going to use rsync with SSH protocol, ssh will be asking for authentication and if we won’t provide a password to cron it will not work. In order to work cron smoothly, it’s required to first setup passwordless ssh logins for rsync.

To setup a cron, open crontab file with the following command.

crontab –e

Below an example  to run rsync every 5 minutes to sync the data between two web servers.

*/5        *        *        *        *   rsync -avzhe ssh remoteuser@remoteserver:/var/www/ /var/www/

Meer informatie

Voor meer informatie of voor een persoonlijk adviesgesprek kunt u altijd vrijblijvend contact met mij opnemen.

E-Mail

info@tuncaysahin.nl