A tale of rsync

#devops #linux

I was migrating /var directory on some on-premises server I was working on from a low space disk to a larger one and I had to use the infamous rsync for this. I found the necessary parameters to on this article but I didn't like the idea of copying & pasting blindly without knowing what each parameters do. So I just looked the man page of rsync and decided to document what I found here for future references.

The full command I used:

rsync -aqx /var/* /mnt/newvar

Here's a table with each flag explained:

Flag	Usage
-a	Shorthand for `-rlptgoD`
-r	Recursive
-l	Copy symlinks as symlinks
-p	Preserve permissions
-t	Preserve modification time
-g	Preserve group
-o	Preserve user
-D	Preserve devices files & special files
-x	Don't cross filesystem boundaries ()
-q	Make it quiet

The -x flag means don't copy other filesystem files and directories like NFS, Samba, ..etc. 1

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