Use rsync 2.0 with trickle for upload-limited differential data backup

Recently, I wanted to backup all my home pictures to my web hosting at www.dreamhost.com, which has tons of transfer… but I wanted to do it with the linux server in my home. I yum’d in rsync, but it was version 3 and was incompatible with my web host.

Didn’t seem like a problem.

So i downloaded version 2… but surprise, version two does not have a –limit option for bandwidth.

I did some searching and found a program called trickle, which through methods I don’t fully understand can be successfully used to limit upload to 15Kb/sec for rsync as seen below:

rsync -a -r -e "trickle -u 15 ssh" --progress \usr\homeserv\Pictures backupuser@backup.integrii.net:your/path/to/files/

It helps to run this in a screen session that you can check up on.

I set this to run in cron.d and my pictures are automatically synced up behind the scenes for me and securely stored off-site. Yay!

2 Response to “Use rsync 2.0 with trickle for upload-limited differential data backup”


  1. 1 Jon

    rsync has –bwlimit although trickle is a much nicer way

  1. 1 Bookmarks about Rsync

Leave a Reply