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I am running the following rsync command nightly:

rsync -varhR --delete --stats --files-from=files_to_include / /media/drive/snapshots/nightly.0

Here is the files_to_include file

home/
etc/
var/www/

If I take a look in /var/www/html/ I have several folders and files

If I take a look in /media/drive/snapshopshots/nightly.0/var/www/html/, its completely empty. No files or directories here.

So for some reason, that html folder is not getting sync'ed.

I manually tried running this command:

rsync -varhR --delete --stats /var/www/ /media/drive/snapshots/nightly.0

And then it sync'ed correctly. So something is going on with the --files-from flag I guess. Are there some sort of limitations to that option?

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how are you running this command? is it a cronjob? – The Unix Janitor Nov 22 '10 at 20:43
yes, cronjob as root – Jakobud Nov 22 '10 at 20:51
Did you try with --files-from=files_to_include on the command line? Did you try with a different --files-from file? If you created files_to_include on a Windows machine, did you check for spurious CRs? – Gilles Nov 22 '10 at 21:02
Also run it with -v to get verbose output. This will tell you WHAT its trying to sync. I was able to run that exact command (with a different destination) with no issues. – Andrew M. Nov 22 '10 at 21:25

2 Answers

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Make those paths in the include file absolute. i.e. /var/www/ instead of var/www/

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The paths in the include file are relative to whatever you specify in as the source directory in the command, which in my case is "/". If I added a / to the front of them, the paths would end up "//var/www" – Jakobud Nov 23 '10 at 18:39
up vote 0 down vote

If running it from cron, it is best to fully specify the path to files_to_include

I usually redirect output to a file so I can later check for error messages

0 23 * * * /a/b/rsync ... --files-from=/c/d/f2inc ... > /tmp/rsync.log 2>&1
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