Wondering how to perform Rsync from Linux to Windows share? We can help you.

We help some of our customers with Rsync to copy files from one location to another. In the course it was found that it is fast and can also be used for mirroring data and incremental backups.

As part of our Server Management Services, we assist our customers with several Rsync queries.

Today, let us see how to transfer Rsync from Linux to Windows share.

What is 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.

Advantages and features of the Rsync command include:

• Rsync efficiently copies and sync files to or from a remote system.
• Supports copying links, devices, owners, groups, and permissions.
• It’s faster than SCP (Secure Copy) since it allows the transfer of just the differences between two sets of files.
• It consumes less bandwidth using the compression and decompression method while sending and receiving data.

Transfer Rsync from Linux to Windows share

Initially, 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 bob’s home directory into a dir called ‘homedir’ we run:

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

[Stuck with the transfer? We are here to help you]

Conclusion

To conclude, the transfer of Rsync from Linux to Windows share can be done in a few steps. Today, we saw the best fit suggested by our Support Engineers.