Chris has been freelancing in Portland since 2006. He's an expert in OS X and Windows, and well as Android and iOS.
Just recently he's entered the field of DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) in Film and Video Production. Here he's applying his wizardry of computers and mastery of data to managing camera and audio flash cards.
In his spare time, he helps run the organization MicroFlix and run the independant film night, Attack of the Flix
Tumblr | Reel
- 1 month ago
The Perfect Recipe
A while ago Dusty McCord and I got together to figure out how to craft the rsync command for media backup needs. We sat down with the man page and went through the list of options, and we came up with this:
rsync -rltWDcv --progress
It looks prety confusing doesn't it? It's pretty simple when you know the parts. The first parts, rsync, just tells the computer to use the rsync command. The following arguments -rltWDcv are options for the rsync command (full details on the rsync man page), and --progress indicates that we, the user, would like to see the progress of the file transfer. It doesn't show a progress bar, but it does tell you how many files its checked and how many are left.
Let's break down the arguments:
r recursive, copy's the files of the source directory and the sub directories
l copy symlinks, normally we would not encounter these, but there's always a possiblity
t copy time, this copies the timestamp of the original file
W whole file, this copies the whole file instead of just the bytes that are different
D devices, another item we shouldn't encounter, but just in case...
c checksum, this is the most secure method of comparing two files, read more here.
v verbose, displays a log of each file transaction, that way it's easy to spot if something went wrong