Birmingham mumbai

[
 315 
]
When you've had more NFS practice than you can tolerate, we'll move on to a few 
ways in which you can copy files from one node to another without needing to set 
up an intermediary service or daemon.
Transferring files with rsync
Of all the countless tools and utilities available in the Linux and Unix world, few 
are as beloved as 
rsync
. 
rsync
 is a utility that you can use to copy data from one 
place to another very easily, and there are many options available to allow you to be 
very specific about how you want the data to be transferred. Examples of its many 
use cases include copying files while preserving permissions, copying files while 
backing up replaced files, and even setting up incremental backups. If you don't 
already know how to use 
rsync
, you'll probably want to get lots of practice with it, 
as it's something you'll soon see will be indispensable during your career as a Linux 
administrator, and it is also something that the Linux community generally assumes 
you already know. 
rsync
 is not hard to learn. Most administrators can learn the 
basic usage in about an hour or less, but the countless options available will lead 
you to learn new tricks even years down the road.
Another aspect that makes 
rsync
 flexible is the many ways you can manipulate the 
source and target directories. I mentioned earlier that 
rsync
 is a tool you can use to 
copy data from one place to another. The beauty of this is that the source and target 
can literally be anywhere you'd like. For example, the most common usage of 
rsync
 
is to copy data from a directory on one server to a directory on another server over 
the network. However, you don't even have to use the network; you can even copy 
data from one directory to another on the same server. While this may not seem like 
a useful thing to do at first, consider that the target directory may be a mount point 
that leads to a backup disk, or an NFS share that actually exists on another server. 
This also works in reverse: you can copy data from a network location to a local 
directory if you desire.
To get started with practicing with 
rsync
, I recommend that you find some sample 
files to work with. Perhaps you have a collection of documents you can use, 
MP3 files, videos, text files, basically any kind of data you have lying around. It's 
important to make a copy of this data. If we make a mistake we could overwrite 
things, so it's best to work with a copy of the data, or data you don't care about, 
while you're practicing. If you don't have any files to work with, you can create 
some text files. The idea is to practice copying files from one place to another; it 
really doesn't matter what you copy or where you send it to. I'll walk you through 
some 
rsync
 examples that will progressively increase in complexity. The first few 
examples will show you how to back up a 
home
 directory, but later examples will 
be potentially destructive so you will probably want to work with sample files until 
you get the hang of it.

---

Sharing and Transferring Files