Rsync happiness

I recently got around to setting up a backup of my data. I decided rather than using something like Drop Box (which I'm sure is great) I'd keep things simple and set up a new EBS volume on my EC2 box and rsync my data there.

Here was the initial command I used to get the first sync in place manually.

rsync -arvzh --progress -e 'ssh -i path to pub key<path to pub key>' /dir/to/backup user@host:/backup/dir/here</path>

A quick review of the flags

-a archive mode (preserve timestamps)

-r recurse into directories

-v verbose

-z compress data during transfer

-h output in human readable format

--progress show a nice progress meter (won't want this in script)

-e specify remote shell and put any further args in quotes