What is "rsync"

rsync is a utility that keeps copies of a file on two computer systems. It is commonly found on Unix-like systems and functions as both a file synchronization and file transfer program. The rsync algorithm is a type of delta encoding, and is used to minimize network usage. Zlib may be used for additional compression, and SSH or stunnel can be used for data security.

Rsync is typically used to synchronize files and directories between two different systems. For example, if the command rsync local-file user@remote-host:remote-file is run, rsync will use SSH to connect as user to remote-host. Once connected, it will invoke the remote host's rsync and then the two programs will determine what parts of the file need to be transferred over the connection.

Rsync can also operate in a daemon mode, serving files in the native rsync protocol (using the "rsync://" syntax).

It is released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.