From it’s man page, rsync is a program that behaves in much the same way that rcp does, but has many more options and uses the rsync remote-update protocol to greatly speed up file transfers when the destination file is being updated.

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network connection, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.

Say 192.168.1.10 (anduril) is the backup destination , herugrim is the host’s hostname, the following step will automatically rsync the home directory to the backup server.