How can I use rsync to backup files changed within a recent period?

linux scripting backup rsync bsd
Ken picture Ken · Jun 3, 2009 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

Is it possible to specify a time range so that rsync only operates on recently changed files.

I'm writing a script to backup recently added files over SSH and rsync seems like an efficient solution. My problem is that my source directories contain a huge backlog of older files which I have no interest in backing up.

The only solution I've come across so far is doing a find with ctime to generate a --files-from file. This works, but I have to deal with some old installations with versions of rsync that don't support --files-from. I'm considering generating --include-from patterns in the same way but would love to find something more elegant.

Answer

Ken picture Ken · Jun 4, 2009

It looks like you can specify shell commands in the arguments to rsync (see Remote rsync executes arbitrary shell commands)

so I have been able to successfully limit the files that rsync looks at by using:

rsync -av remote_host:'$(find logs -type f -ctime -1)' local_dir

This looks for any files changed in the last day (-ctime -1) and then rsyncs those into local_dir.

I'm not sure if this feature is by design but I'm still digging into the documentation.

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