In this blog post we examine in depth how to best provision one MySQL database cluster node from another using rsync. Since there are many possible ways to handle provisioning by rsync, we will do multiple posts on the topic, starting with the most basic - both the source and target database nodes are fully offline for the duration of the rsync. While this is not an ideal scenario because two nodes are down at once, it does allow one replica to be provisioned from another replica when all else fails.