How to rsync multiple source folders

You can pass multiple source arguments.

rsync -a /etc/fstab /home/user/download bkp

This creates bkp/fstab and bkp/download, like the separate commands you gave. It may be desirable to preserve the source structure instead. To do this, use / as the source and use include-exclude rules to specify which files to copy. There are two ways to do this:

• Explicitly include each file as well as each directory component leading to it, with /*** at the end of directories when you want to copy the whole directory tree:

  rsync -a 
      --include=/etc --include=/etc/fstab 
      --include=/home --include=/home/user --include="/home/user/download/***" 
      --exclude="*" / bkp
  

• Include all top-level directories with /*/ (so that rsync will traverse /etc and /home when looking for files to copy) and second-level directories with /*/*/ (for /home/user), but strip away directories in which no file gets copied. This is more convenient because you don’t have to list parents explicitly. You could even use --prune-empty-dirs --include="*/" instead of counting the number of levels, but this is impractical here as rsync would traverse the whole filesystem to explore directories even though none of the include rules can match anything outside /etc and /home/user/download.

  rsync -a --prune-empty-dirs 
      --include="/*/" --include="/*/*/" 
      --include=/etc/fstab 
      --include="/home/user/download/***" 
      --exclude="*" / bkp
  

I really like Gilles’ answer, however, I’d like to add that in my view the requirement to sync multiple folders while preserving the directory structure is best met by passing multiple source arguments in conjunction with the --relative option.

In this case, we could have something as follows:

rsync -aR /etc/fstab /home/user/download bkp

which would result in bkp/etc/fstab and bkp/home/user/download.

The best part about this is that (I believe since rsync v. 2.6.7) we can in essence control how much of the directory structure we want to replicate at the receiver.
(See the documentation on the --relative option here)

So e.g. if we did this

rsync -aR /home/./user1/download /home/./user2/download bkp

we would end up with bkp/user1/download and bkp/user2/download.

This also works – curly braces, containing comma separated list of sources.

rsync -vap --progress --stats root@server:{/etc,/root/backups,/home/ultralazer} /mnt/bigdrive

Somewhat similar to what happens when you invoke curly braces sytnax with cp and certain other utilities:

cp -vr /etc /root/backups /home/{ultralazer,zerocool} /mnt/bigdrive