CUCC Expedition Handbook - rsync Quick

Quick Reminder - rsync

Manual Version Control using rsync

This is NOT a tutorial. This is a set of reminders for people who already know all this stuff.

expofiles (all the big files and documents)

Photos, scans (logbooks, drawn-up cave segments) (This was about 40GB of stuff in 2019 which you probably don't actually need locally).

If you don't need an entire copy of all of it, then it is probably best to use Filezilla/ftp to copy just a small part of the filesystem to your own machine and to upload the bits you add to or edit. Instructions for installing and using Filezilla are found in the expo user instructions for uploading photographs: uploading.html.

To sync all the files from the server to your local expofiles directory on your laptop:

rsync -nazv --delete-after --prune-empty-dirs expo@expo.survex.com:expofiles/ /home/expo/expofiles

To sync the local expofiles directory back to the server after you have edited updates (e.g. scanned some hand-drawn surveys into expofiles/surveyscans/ (but only if your machine runs Linux):

rsync -nazv /home/expo/expofiles/surveyscans/2019/ expo@expo.survex.com/expofiles/surveyscans/2019

then CHECK that the list of files it produces matches the ones you absolutely intend to delete forever! ONLY THEN do it without the "-n" option. "-n" is the same as "--dry-run" which shows you the overwriting changes but doesn't actually do them.

Always

• do a dry-run of rsync from the server to your laptop immediately before you do an upload to the server
• use --delete-after --prune-empty-dirs when downloading, but never when uploading
• work at the minimum scope of folders you need, e.g. within expofiles/photos/ or expofiles/surveyscans/ not for the whole of expofiles all at once.
• take exagerated care with the placement of the final slash in directory parameters to the rsync. Get it wrong and you duplicate things instead of updating them and it takes ages to sort out.

(do be incredibly careful not to delete piles of stuff then rsync back, or to get the directory level of the command wrong - as it'll all get deleted on the server too, and we may not have backups!). It's absolutely vital to use rsync --dry-run --delete-after first to check what would be deleted.

If you are using rsync from a Windows machine you will not get all the files as some filenames are incompatible with Windows. What will happen is that rsync will invisibly change the names as it downloads them from the Linux expo server to your Windows machine, but then it forgets what it has done and tries to re-upload all the renamed files to the server even if you have touched none of them. Now there won't be any problems with simple filenames using all lowercase letters and no funny characters, but we have nothing in place to stop anyone creating such a filename somewhere in that 40GB or of detecting the problem at the time. So don't do it. If you have a Windows machine use Filezilla not rsync.

(We may also have an issue with rsync not using the appropriate user:group attributes for files pushed back to the server. This may not cause any problems, but watch out for it.)