Original author(s) | Andrew Tridgell, Paul Mackerras |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Wayne Davison |
Initial release | June 19, 1996; 23 years ago[1] |
Stable release | 3.1.3 (January 28, 2018; 20 months ago)[±][2] |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Platform | Cross-platform |
Type | Data transfer, differential backup |
License | GPLv3 |
Website | rsync.samba.org |
rsync local-file user@remote-host:remote-file
is run, rsync will use SSH to connect as user
to remote-host
.[4] Once connected, it will invoke the remote host's rsync and then the two programs will determine what parts of the local file need to be transferred so that the remote file matches the local one.rsync
, it has become a standard Linux utility, included in all popular Linux distributions. It has been ported to Windows (via Cygwin, Grsync, or SFU[11]), FreeBSD,[12] NetBSD,[13] OpenBSD,[14] and macOS.cp
, rcp
and scp
, rsync
requires the specification of a source and of a destination, of which at least one must be local.[15]rsync
can synchronize Unix clients to a central Unix server using rsync
/ssh
and standard Unix accounts. It can be used in desktop environments, for example to efficiently synchronize files with a backup copy on an external hard drive. A scheduling utility such as cron
can carry out tasks such as automated encrypted rsync
-based mirroring between multiple hosts and a central server.--checksum
. This forces a full checksum comparison on every file present on both systems. Barring rare checksum collisions, this avoids the risk of missing changed files at the cost of reading every file present on both systems.-E
or --extended-attributes
switch which allows retaining much of the HFS file metadata when syncing between two machines supporting this feature. This is achieved by transmitting the Resource Fork along with the Data Fork.[29]Program | Operating system | Free software | Description | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Linux | macOS | Windows | |||
Back In Time | Yes | No | No | Yes | |
BackupAssist | No | No | Yes | No | Direct mirror or with history, VSS. |
cwRsync | No | No | Yes | No | Based on Cygwin. |
Grsync | Yes | Yes | Yes[32] | Yes | Graphical Interface for rsync on Linux Systems. |
GS RichCopy 360 | No | No | Yes [33] | No | Designed only for MS Windows workstations and servers with VSS support. |
LuckyBackup | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Rclone | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Rsync clone that supports more than 10 cloud storage system providers. |
Robocopy | No | No | Yes | No | Windows tool with similar functionality. |
Syncrify | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Uses rsync over HTTP(S). |