Backing Up Files & Photos with RSYNC

I recently ran a scan of my Macs hard drive, to see why I was using up 90% of my 1TB Hard drive, and it turns out the biggest culprits were my Photos and Videos folders from the last years travels. I have a removable 4TB Drive that I like to use for backing up my photos and videos too... this can either be done manually by dragging the folders over, or if you're like me, you can use a command line tool called RSYNC.

rsync -av --update "/Users/joegilmore/Downloads/TEST/" "/Volumes/5TB/TEST/"

-a flag = Archive Mode and keep recursion
-v flag = Verbose Mode - shows you what's happening as files get copied!
--update flag = only copy files that are newer than the destination files

Please note: about the source folders last trailing slash / - this is important, as it tells RSYNC to copy the contents of the folder, not the folder itself. So if you don't want to end up with /Volumes/5TB/TEST/TEST/ then be careful here.

I recommend getting into the habit of using RSYNC instead of dragging and dropping, it's generally more reliable and can be faster and a much more robust method of transferring files especially when there's a lot of them.

See my other blog article about Finding duplicate files with NodeJS - just in case you accidentally copied over a bunch of duplicate files.