Created Sunday 18 July 2010

The most important tool you will need: rsync. It copies changes between 2 directories (potentially on 2 different servers)

rsync -av src_dir/* user@server:/dest_dir/
-a means archive mode, which means recursive, preserve permissions, last modified time etc
-v means verbose

--exclude .svn means ignore all paths that contain .svn i.e. all svn folders and their contents!
NOTE: exclude can also be used to match specific files e.g. --exclude docs/readme.txt
--delete means if you have deleted a file in the source dir, delete it at the destination dir too!

See also
Backup Script
Compression