Copying / syncing files over a local network with rsync

Just a short article to document for myself how to copy a large directory (e.g. a user-folder) over a local network. While (s)cp might work for smaller operations, rsync is my preferred tool as you can restart it when it breaks + in case you found an optimization, you can just abort and restart. Some things to take into account before I share the command:

• Do not mount a drive, just use ssh
• if you're sharing from macOS, make sure file sharing has access to the entire harddrive, otherwise some important folders will sync empty (e.g. Documents(!))
• Make sure you exclude files you don't need (a home folder typically contains many cache-files that you don't want to sync to a new machine
• Do not enable some form of compression (it waists cpu cycles when your network is fast enough)

So here is the command:

rsync -aWP --inplace --exclude-from=exclude-file.txt murb@someaddress:/Users/username/ .

Breakdown:

• -a is the archival option, and it is typically what y…

Own and publish it yourself

In an ideal world, content has just a single place it lives, speaking W3Cish, at the URL. Preferably, I'd say, that URL is part of your domain. You created the content and therefore you should own the content and also publish it. I don't think it has much to do with 'ego' (which has a negative connotation), but is more about 'identity'. Think about Andrew Keen's critique on all this web2.0 user generated content. Keen basically says that much of the user generated content is lacking attribution. Because it is is lacking attribution it is hard to value, hard to judge, which is a bad thing in a culture where we build ideas on top of others. Owning and publishing the content yourself (via your own 'blog') solves that issue to some extend. But that is in theory. You want to make sure readers find your ramblings, hence it is important to make sure your work is where your readers are. The thing you could do right now is simply duplicate your content. But the primary source should be your …