Rsync is an open source file synchronization program. It’s multi platform, since it works on Linux, Unix and Windows with cygwin. It’s a very advanced tool that can be used to make backups, or to copy files across the network. It can also be used to make disk-to-disk copies of files. The advantages of rsync is it’s very efficient to copy large files, it’s very robust (it makes checksums), and very flexible. For all of these reasons, it’s better than scp/ftp/http for files copies, and it’s also a very good backup program. It also support all types of files (flat files, links, hard links), extended attributes (xattr) and ACLs (advanced permissions). It can be used to make all sort of backups: full backups, differential backups, incremental backups, as long as you work on flat files, which is often the case on Linux/Unix systems.

For all these reasons, rsync is bundled with SystemRescueCd. I wrote a new documentation in the handbook to help people to start using rsync: Backup and transfer your data using rsync. This tutorial will tell you why rsync is great, what you can do with it, how to use it, and what are the most interesting options.