The guys over at slicehost turned me on to a technique for using rsync for backups.
Here is a typical script that I now use, it works far better than things like Filezilla and Transmit because it’s very fast doesn’t require manual intervention, can be run from a crontab, and it’s free.
The script below clones everything in the remote folder /home/myname to the local folder /backups/localfolder
Read the article above for more details.
#!/bin/tcsh -fx set exclude = "/tmp/exclude.$$" cat <$exclude access.log EOF echo "Starting $* at `date`" rsync -e 'ssh -p 12345' -avl --delete --stats --exclude-from $exclude --progress nick@123.345.78.999:/home/myname /backups/localfolder echo "Completed $* at `date`" rm -f $exclude