Rysnc not sending files, but acts like it is..

Question

This ones got me really confused.
I'm trying to backup my laptop's most important folders, like /etc/ and /home/, to my arch linux server. I somehow managed to backup my /etc directory, but since then, its not working.
It looks like it worked, sometimes even giving accurate-ish "speed up" reports at the end. But when I SSH into my server, and run "ls -l" in the folder everything was meant to be sent to, theres nothing there.
This is one of the commands I've used, using the "push" method.
rsync --progress -avz /home/ -e 'ssh -p 1984 [email protected]:/backup/laptop2002/home'
From what I know, this is meant to compress my /home contents, preserving permission and whatnot thanks to the -a switch, sending the contents of said /home directory to my password-less, yet ssh-key-secured server on 192.168.1.70, dumping it in the /backup/laptop2002/home directory. But it doesnt. It reports that it has, but doesnt.
This is the other one I tried, running this on the server to "pull" the /home folder from my laptop.
rsync --progress -avz -a 'ssh -p 1984 [email protected]:/home/ /backup/laptop2002/home/'
Still no joy. It's asthough I'm running rsync with the -n switch to simulate the backup. But obviously I'm not.
Im totally baffled. It's really quite frustrating.
Any ideas?
Thanks.

Answer 1

The -e option should only contain "ssh -p1984", not any hostnames/paths.
To synchronize your local folder to the remote server use:
rsync --progress -avz -e 'ssh -p1984' /backup/laptop2002/home/ [email protected]:/home/
To synchronize the remote folder to your local machine use:
rsync --progress -avz -e 'ssh -p1984' [email protected]:/home/ /backup/laptop2002/home/