GoliatOne

Remote backups with rsync from MacOS to Ubuntu.

Test you can log in without password prompt.

sudo ssh -i /backup/ssh_key user@user.evbackup.com

If you don't look the appendix

#Notice we are using --dry-run :)
sudo rsync -avz --dry-run -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub" ./lib root@138.79.125.94:/root/tmp

-avs - All objects, verbose output, do not allow remote shell to interpret characters; in other words, file names with spaces and special characters will not be translated, which is what you want most likely, especially if you have Windows files, too.

--delete will delete files at the target (destination), if they do not exist in the source. This means you will always keep an up to date list of files and the source and destination will match, plus the destination will not slowly grow in size with older, perhaps irrelevant content.

Advanced options

There are a million, literally. So here's a sampling of good things:

-l (lowercase L) when symlinks are encountered, recreate the symlink on the destination.
--exclude=PATTERN exclude files matching PATTERN
--exclude-from=FILE read exclude patterns from FILE
--include=PATTERN don't exclude files matching PATTERN
--include-from=FILE read include patterns from FILE

Likewise, the option --files-from=FILE allows you to specify a detailed list of directories you wish to include in your backup. Please note that if you write down directory paths without trailing slash, they will be recreated blank, and if you do add the trailing slash, their content will also be copied.

Cron job

Read about pipes

We are appending both standard output and standard error to a log file sync.log. If you only want to output standard error, use 2>> sync.log If you use > instead of >> you will be overriding instead of appending- so that your file does not grow to big.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Start rsync job"
sudo rsync -avz --dry-run -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub" ./lib root@178.79.145.84:/root/tmp &>> sync.log

exit 0

Crontab

* */1 * * * /home/roger/rsync-backup.sh

Appendix

How to create ssh keys:

Create keys:

#Notice the command ends in ''
 sudo ssh-keygen -f /backup/ssh_key -t rsa -N ''

Upload keys:

#Port defaults to 22
ssh-copy-id <username>@<host> -p <port_nr>

If you do not have ssh-copy-id on your machine you can use brew to install:

brew install ssh-copy-id

Another alternative is to copy the public key file to the server and concatenate it onto the authorized_keys file manually. It is wise to back that up first:

cp authorized_keys authorized_keys_Backup
cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys

Rsync Backup

Advanced options

Cron job

Appendix