rsync copy several modules into directories

Question

I'm trying to use rsync to copy data from a webserver to a local backup. Considering I need to copy several things, including some home directories from different users, I'm running rsyncd with a few predefined modules.

• [homedirs] with path /home and includes/excludes set up to not copy e.g. cache files
• [database] with the path set to where I make SQL dumps
• [server] with the path set to where the server configuration lives

I'm currently running three separate commands in the form of rsync -az $HOST::$MODULE ./$MODULE whenever I create a backup. I've tried rsync -az $HOST::$MODULE1 ::$MODULE2 ::$MODULE3 ./, but this results in the contents of those modules being dumped in the same place, instead of in separate directories.
I wouldn't mind the directories where the backups end up in to have the same name as the server-side dirs (e.g. /path/to/backups/home), or to have arbitrary other names, so long as the files are consistently split into a different directory for every module offered through rsyncd.

Answer 1

I don't think you can do what you want in one command. The best I can think of right now is three parallel transfers:

for module in homedirs database server
do
    rsync -az "$rHost::$module/" "$module" &
done
wait

But this is essentially already what you have.

You mentioned you're transferring from a remote server. You might want to consider some sort of encryption tunnel (SSH or VPN) as the rsyncd protocol isn't encrypted and data is transmitted in the clear