rsync question
 

Hey guys, I have rsync going to another remote server
it works good, however, lets say server A deleted a directory, server B wont sync up to it.

if I were to add a directory to Server A, then server B will add it as well. so server B is just not deleting stuff.

is there a proper rsync command i can use ?

would rsync -xzva --delete /src /dst delete everything and start the rsync from scratch? or is there another way to do this

It would sync /src to /dst/src, first by deleting from /dst/src anything that did not exist in the single filesystem under /src. Then it would transfer any new or changed files in the single filesystem under /src to a tree under /dst/src.

You probably wantedto transfer the contents of /src to /dst rather than to a directory /dst/src.

If there are any hard linked or sparse files under /src, you should take a look at the "-H" and "-S" options.

Thank you for the reply!

I understand /src vs /src/ actually took me a while why rsync was doing that ha ha!
anyhow, so --delete would delete the stuff that did not exist from /src, but not the entire content, correct?
reason I ask is because I rsync 100 gigs and it would take way too long for it to back up

It will delete only the files that do not exist in the source. There are several variants of "--delete", such as "--delete before", "--delete during", and "--delete after". You really should read the rsync manpage and understand when some of those might be more appropriate.

You can always run rsync with the "-n" and "-v" options to safely see exactly what it is going to do and when.

ya that is what i thought...however it is not working for me.
this is what I am using

#!/bin/bash
rsync -zavh --delete /files root@server.com:/backup/daily

my cron job is set to * * * * script.sh so i can test it every min

when I run the su -s * command, i see it is always deleting everything inside and starting the rsync over.
so that is the part I am trying to figure out.

i even let the rsync finish then ran
rsync -zavh --delete /files root@server.com:/backup/daily again and deleted everything all over and starts
the rsync from start

"su -s *"? What is that supposed to do?

What are your source and destination filesystems?

Perhaps some issue with the "root@" where the remote rsync user is different from the local user. I don't know. I've never used rsync that way. You could try including the "-i" (--itemize-changes) option and get some idea from what rsync believed had to be changed.

I've always stuck the --delete after the target, eg:
and never had any issue with it deleting files on the target not present in the src.