![rsync for mac os tags rsync for mac os tags](https://researchit.las.iastate.edu/files/page/images/1_0.png)
That was odd, and I fixed it by using SetFile to change the creation date for my existing folders. What I discovered is that if you do things this way, the creation date on the server's robservatory_com folder gets applied to the date-specific folder-even though the folder was created by the rsync command! In my case, that means it was dated November of 2009, when the folder was originally created on the server. The trailing slash on the link-dest means that rsync will grab the contents of the indicated folder, and place them in the directory specified on the last line (the date-specific folder). link-dest=$homeDir/TMrobservatory/current $userhost:$remoteHTML/robservatory_com/ \ To get that structure, my rsync command looked like this: /usr/local/bin/rsync -aP \ On my Mac, I wanted the backup folders structured like this:īackups folder > robservatory > date-specific folder > HTML files Top level folder > robservatory_com > HTML files My blog's structure on the server looks something like this: The first behavior has to do with the creation date on folders created by rsync (though this had nothing to do with my vanishing backups). In investigating why this happened, I stumbled across two rsync/macOS behaviors that I wasn't aware of…and if you're using rsync for backup, they may be of interest to you, too. Soon after I added this bit to my new script, though, I had a surprise: All of my backups, save the most recent, vanished. With my Time Machine-like rsync backups running well, I decided it was time to migrate over the cleanup portion of my old script-namely, the bit that removes older backups.