Well, this is going to be one of those very geeky posts that is really just a reminder to me as opposed to for anyone else.

Rsync its just a tool that synchronizes directories.  So why have I been finding this tool so handy lately?  Well it all relates to music.  I have a subscription with emusic which tends to have some pretty great, if somehwat obscure albums.  They serve up high quality mp3's which you can play and listen to anywhere!  Sweet!  Now the problem is that I tend to download these things everywhere.  I find some music that I want and I download onto my laptop, then I download it onto my work computer, then the desktop.  This music is all over the place.  And now when I want it, where can I find it.

So i have a central location on my server where I put all this music.  I've been using ftp to move the files around, but to be honest, it is just a little too time consuming, and consequently, I don't do it.

Enter Rsync

rsync lets you take the contents of one directory and copy it to another. That's it.  The impressive thing is that it can do this through an ssh connection.  So now, where ever I may be, if I hace access to a command line I can quickly send the music on that computer to my computer!

The commands:

send from this computer to the server

rsync -avz -e ssh /home/jeff/Music/ username@jrichards.ca:/home/username/Music

or get music off the server

rsync -avz -e ssh username@jrichards.ca:/home/username/Music/ /home/jeff/Music

that's it.  be careful with the slashes at the end, they're important.