rsync --delete did not remove file in destination while with ssh

Question

On my RHEL6 pair of servers, I tested the rsync from server-1 to Server-2 with SSH. Everything was good as expected. However, when I moved a file under A directory, A/x.file to B/ of /home/user on Server-1, repeated the same rsync with --delete (or similar options) did not remove x.file on A/ and backup x.file to B/ on Server-2. Here is the rsync script:

rsync -avhu -e ssh --delete home/user/ remote_user@remote_host:/home/user/. 

ssh was set up without passphrase. I tried different order of those options, none of them work, meaning that x.file was still under A/ at destination (server-2), not on B/. What went wrong?

Answer 1

Here's some general guidance on how to get rsync to do what you'd like it to do using the options you've selected in your script:

To copy the contents of a directory from the source directory to a remote destination directory (the first time), you can do:

 rsync --archive --verbose --human-readable source -e ssh username@servername:/home/user/ . 

Once you've made some changes to the source directory that you'd like to sync with your destination directory, do:

 rsync --archive --verbose --human-readable --delete source/ -e ssh username@servername:/home/user/source . 

Take note:

• When you first copy a source directory to a destination directory, you do not need to follow source with a / (forward slash).

• When you sync a source directory to a destination directory, you do need to follow source with a / (forward slash).This / means the content of the source directory, and not the directory itself.

You can test drive your script with this option: --dry-run .

Answer 2

This slightly modified code works for me:

rsync -avhu -e ssh --delete /home/user/ remote_user@remote_host:/home/user/. 

If your production code really does reference home/user/ instead of /home/user/ then that could easily be a reason it's failing. You would also be getting an error rsync: change_dir "/home/user//home/user" failed: No such file or directory (2)