I recently got around to setting up a backup of my data. I decided rather than using something like Drop Box (which I'm sure is great) I'd keep things simple and set up a new EBS volume on my EC2 box and rsync my data there.
Here was the initial command I used to get the first sync in place manually.
/dir/to/backup user@host:/backup/dir/here</path>```
A quick review of the flags
**-a** archive mode (preserve timestamps)
**-r** recurse into directories
**-v** verbose
**-z** compress data during transfer
**-h** output in human readable format
**--progress** show a nice progress meter (won't want this in script)
**-e** specify remote shell and put any further args in quotes