Data backup and recovery is essential. Failure to backup puts data at risk of loss. Users often only learn this lesson after critical information they require is permanently lost. Attempting to recover from such data loss can be both time consuming and extremely difficult.
Having accummulated almost 1TB worth of digital data (all my files, images, videos, software code, etc.) over the past 12 years, it only made sense for me to backup all these data and store the backup somewhere safe and secure. A corrupted hard drive, heaven forbid, may send these 12 years worth of hard work, including family mementos, pictures and videos down a black hole and I will ultimately get a severe and painful beating from my wife ;-)
The first backup I made was in December last year. After testing a few GUI-based tools and seeing these give up the ghost and hang up on me, I settled for the simplicity and power of RSYNC.
From a terminal interface, a simple command such as:
rsync -avz /src/bar/ /dest/bar/
will recursively transfer all files from the directory /src/bar/ into the /dest/bar/ directory on the local machine. The files are transferred in “archive” mode, ensuring that symbolic links, devices, attributes, permissions, ownerships, etc. are preserved in the transfer.
Last year, my first full backup took about 24 hours to complete. This year, the incremental backup (copying only my new and modified files) took only 6 hours to complete. All that data was backed up into an external hard drive and this external hard drive is now stored in a safe location, for extra protection and security.
My data is safe... my marriage is safe... and RSYNC is the only tool that could do it.
~florent flora
