A major part of my photography workflow is backing up the newer image files. It has been a little slow and cumbersome so far as I was using the unix “diff” program to find out which directories/files need to be copied to the usb hard drive. It was tremendously slow to show the changes on stdout before I could run the copy commands in batches.
I was finally fed up and ran some searches when the unix “rsync” program showed up. Voila. It runs a gazillion times faster than “diff -r” and also allows me to dry run. Plus, I don’t have to run the copy commands separately.
I just did this to backup my local photo directory: (hdd is a symlink to the usb hard drive)
rsync -avzn ./photography/ ./hdd/photography/
Followed by removing the “n” switch and running the command again. Gotta love working with *nix.