rsync for snapshot backups, wrong syntax?

[Cubytus]

Hello community,

my goal here is to make a backup of my Virtualbox hard drives. They reside on an external drive that's not always connected. The backup target is a Synology NAS. There's currently one full backup in /VBox-bckp folder on the Synology.

I tested the following command:

sudo rsync -Haurov --progress --ignore-errors --stats --link-dest=rsync_user@synology.local:/volume1/VBox-bckp/2016-08-29 /Volumes/G670/VirtualBox/ rsync_user@synology.local:/volume1/VBox-bckp/2016-08-28

but was met with this error:

rsync_user@synology.local's password:
building file list ...
401 files to consider
--link-dest arg does not exist: rsync_user@synology.local:/volume1/VBox-bckp/2016-08-29

I checked, and if the path doesn't exist, rsync is supposed to create it. In my case, I manually created an empty folder names 2016-08-29, but the same error appears.

What is the error?

 

[danwestbrook]

Not sure if this might help, but this is how I backup files on my Mac.. I then just set a crontab to run the rsync.sh when needed

rsync -e ssh -avz --delete /Path/to/folders/to/backup username@IPAddress:/Path/to/folders/to/store/backup

 

[Cubytus]

I am not sure this produces date-tagged folders on the backup server, does it?