I use this little bash script (as a daily cron job) to selectively mirror directories on two hard drives in case I lose one (very poor man's backup solution). I

I use this little bash script (as a daily cron job) to selectively mirror directories on two hard drives in case I lose one (very poor man's backup solution). I imagine it could be used for deploying code (modified for remote machine of course): #!/bin/sh RSYNC="/usr/bin/rsync" # Verify with 'which rsync' DIRS="/home/xich /etc" # Directories to be backed up. TARGET="/mnt/secondhd/backup" # Directory into which all backups are placed. # For instance, if TARGET is /mnt/secondhd/backup and DIRS is "/home/user1 /home/user2" # then after running, there will exist a /mnt/secondhd/backup/user1 and # /mnt/secondhd/backup/user2. DO NOT use trailing slashes for any of these paths, # as that will change the behavior of rsync. LOGFILE="/var/log/mirror_hds.log" # For errors only. for dir in $DIRS; do INEX="" if [[ -e "$dir/.mirror_include" ]]; then INEX="--include-from $dir/.mirror_include" fi if [[ -e "$dir/.mirror_exclude" ]]; then INEX="$INEX --exclude-from $dir/.mirror_exclude" fi $RSYNC -av --delete $INEX $dir $TARGET &> $LOGFILE done The .mirror_include and .mirror_exclude files are just newline-delimited lists of file masks (they do what you would expect). I did it like this so each user can modify his own exclusion/inclusion lists (the file belongs to the user), and doesn't have to mess with the cron script (which belongs to root). Inclusion takes precedence. As an example, my exclude file: .* # any file that starts with a period tv # my tv shows directory movies And my include file: .mirror_include # since this would be filtered out above .mirror_exclude .conkyrc