Rsync from Linux to Windows share

Ibmi Media
Server Management Service
59

Are you trying to perform Rsync from Linux to Windows share?

This guide is for you.

Rsync is a command-line utility that helps us to copy files from one location to another. We did experiments and found that it is fast. It can also be used for mirroring data and incremental backups.

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to perform Rsync related queries.

In this context, you shall learn how to transfer Rsync from Linux to Windows share.

More information about Rsync ?

A fast and versatile command-line utility, Rsync (Remote Sync) helps to synchronize files and directories between two locations over a remote shell, or from/to a remote Rsync daemon.

In addition, it provides fast incremental file transfer by transferring only the differences between the source and the destination.

We can use Rsync for mirroring data, incremental backups, copying files between systems. It acts as a replacement for scp, sftp, and cp commands.

Benefits and features of the Rsync command include:

i. Rsync efficiently copies and sync files to or from a remote system.

ii. Supports copying links, devices, owners, groups, and permissions.

iii. It's faster than SCP (Secure Copy) since it allows the transfer of just the differences between two sets of files.

iv. It consumes less bandwidth using the compression and decompression method while sending and receiving data.

How to transfer Rsync from Linux to Windows share ?

To get started, we make a mount point:

mkdir /mnt/share

Then, we mount the smb share:

mount -t cifs -o username=domainusername //ip_add/ShareFolder /mnt/share

It will prompt for a password. It is always a good practice not to provide password within commands.

In addition, if we run the following command we can verify if it has mount:

mount
//ip_add/ShareFolder on /mnt/share type cifs (rw)

Similarly, we can mount it after every boot.

In order to do that we need to add it to /etc/fstab:

//ip_add/ShareFolder /mnt/share smbfs username=domainusername,password=P@S5W0rd 0 0

Now we can Rsync data to it.

For example, to rsync ibmimedia's home directory into a dir called 'homedir' we run:

rsync -avz /home/ibmimedia/ /mnt/share/homedir/