Question

Basically I want to move files to another server on creation preserving the directory structure. I have a solution put it lacks elegance. Also I feel like I’m missing the obvious answer, so thanks in advance for your help and I totally understand if this bores you.

The situation

I have server with limited disk space (let’s call it ‘Tiny’) and a storage server. Tiny creates files every once in a while. I want to store them automatically on the storage server and remove the originals when it’s safe. I have to retain the directory structure of tiny. I don’t know in advance how the dir structure looks like. That is, all files are created in the directory /some/dir/ but sudirectories of this are created on the fly. They should be sotred in /other/fold/ on the storege server preserving the substcrutre under /some/dir. E.g:

/some/dir/bla/foo/bar/snap_001a on tiny —> becomes /other/fold/bla/foo/bar/snap_001a on the storage server. They are all called snap_xxxx wgere xxxx is a four letter alphanumeric string.

My old solution

Now I was thinking to loop over files and scp them. Once scp is finished and returns without error the files on tiny are removed with rm.

#!/bin/bash
# This is invoked by a cronjob ever once in a while.

files=$(find /some/dir/ -name snap_*)

IFS='
'
for current in $files; do
   name=$(basename $current)             # Get base name (i.e. strip directory)
   dir=$(dirname $current)               # Get the directory name of the curent file on tiny
   dir=${dir/\/some\/dir/\/other\/fold}  # Replace the directory root on tiny with the root on the storage server
   ssh -i keyfile [e-mail] \
     mkidir -p $dir                      # create the directory on the storage server and all parents if needed
   scp -i keyfile $current [e-mail]:$dir$name \
     && rm $current                      # remove files on success
done

This however strikes me as unnecssarily complicated and maybe error prone. I thought of rsync but when coping single files, there is no option to create a directory and it’s parents if they don’t exist. Does anyone have an idea, better than mine?

What I ended up using after this thread

rsync -av --remove-sent-files --prune-empty-dirs          \
      -e 'ssh -i /full/path/to/keyfile'                   \
      --include="*/" --include="snap_*" --exclude="*"     \
      /some/dir/ [e-mail]:/other/fold/

More recent versions then the one I was using take --remove-source-files instead of --remove-sent-files. The former being more of a telling name in that it’s clearer what files are deleted. Also --dry-run is a good option to test your parameters BEFORE actually using rsync.

Thanks to Alex Howansky for the solution and to Douglas Leeder for caring!

Answer 1

How do I tell rsync just to copy the snap_xxxx files?

See the –include option.

How do I change the direcotry root?

Just specify it on the command line.

rsync [options] source_dir dest_host:dest_dir

How do I delete the originals on Tiny after transfer to the storage server?

See the –remove-source-files option.