Without direct physical access to my co-located host, backing up and preserving the Infomotions’ 150 GB of website is challenging, but through the use of rsync things are a whole lot easier. rsync is a really cool utility, and thanks go to Francis Kayiwa who recommended it to me in the first place. “Thank you!”

Here is my rather brain-dead back-up utility:

# rsync.sh - brain-dead backup of wilson

# change directories to the local store
cd /Users/eric/wilson

# get rid of any weird Mac OS X filenames
find ./ -name '.DS_Store' -exec rm -rf {} \;

# do the work for one remote file system...
rsync --exclude-from=/Users/eric/etc/rsync-exclude.txt \
    -avz wilson:/disk01/ \
    ./disk01/

# ...and then another
rsync --exclude-from=/Users/eric/etc/rsync-exclude.txt \
    -avz wilson:/home/eric/ \
    ./home/eric/

After I run this code my local Apple Macintosh Time Capsule automatically copies my content to yet a third spinning disk. I feel much better about my data now that I have started using rsync.