How to Use Rsync to Create a Backup on Ubuntu 20.04

Ubuntu 20.04 already contains the rsync package installed. To check this and find out the version, use the command:

If the package is not installed for some reason, use the command:

To launch rsync as a service in Ubuntu 20.04, create the /etc/rsyncd.conf file and copy /lib/systemd/system/rsync.service to /etc/systemd/system/rsync.service.

Now restart the service.

First, add these lines to the rsync configuration file /etc/rsyncd.conf. Change the 'path' parameter to the path to the source files to back up. For ‘uid’ and ‘gid’, use the existing username and group with read permissions in the backup source folders.

The data in the ‘auth users’ parameter and the /etc/rsyncd.passwd file is used for authorization between rsync on different computers. Add a line there, like this:

Change the permissions for the rsyncd.passwd file.

Restart the service to apply the changes.

Create the /etc/rsyncd.passwd file on the receiving server where the backups will be stored. Enter the same password as on the source computer, but without the user name, set 600 permissions for it.

To perform a backup run the command:

Replace source-server-ip with the IP address of the first server, and ‘/destination/path/’ with the path for storing backups.

For regular backups, just add the task to the end of the /etc/crontab file.