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I have alway heard alot about rsync but never used it. Now more than ever I think about backing up my information. I just think about how much I would lose if I didn't back up my picture of my son. So here comes rsync.

It does require that you have a remote or local server access via ssh or if you can run the daemon version of rsync.

Here are some example commands that I have been playing with.

This command will send files and folders in /backup/ to the configured rsync location on the server(test).

 rsync -v -r --delete /backup/ server::test/
 -v = verbose
 -r = recursive
 --delete = will delete the files on the remote machine if you delete them locally

This is the reverse command. Sending files from the server to your local machine.

 rsync -v -r --delete server::test/ /backup/

To go along with this if you are using a windows machine you can still use rsync with a few more hoops to jump through.

This download link http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/download.html will get you to a windows version of rsync. It uses cygwin so when you specify the folder you will need to append /cygdrive/c before the /backup to specify C:\backup on your windows machine.

Finally, I pondered the ability to have a shared point to distribute information. An example is that my parents want full copies of our son's pictures. So if I could setup an rsync connection we could all add pictures to the rsync bucket and then each have a folder that we add content to. Those folders would be syncronized together and we could copy out the files that we want to keep. An initial gui with all the values hard coded is below using shoes, by whytheluckystiff.

 <http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/>

CODE:

 Shoes.app :height => 150, :width => 250 do
   background rgb(240, 250, 208)
   stack :margin => 10 do
     button "SyncToBucket" do
     SyncToBucket = system('cmd.exe /c C:\rsync\bin\rsync.exe -v -r --delete /cygdrive/c/backup/pat server::test/pat')
     if SyncToBucket == true
         @label.replace "Your files have are syncronized to the Bucket"
     else
         @label.replace "Failed to sync to Bucket"
     end
     end
     button "SyncFromBucket" do
       SyncFromBucket = system('cmd.exe /c C:\rsync\bin\rsync.exe -v -r --delete --exclude=pat/* server::test/ /cygdrive/c/backup/')
     if SyncFromBucket == true
         @label.replace "Your files have are syncronized from the Bucket to you"
     else
         @label.replace "Failed to sync from the Bucket"
     end
     end
     @label = para "Press ", strong("start"), " to begin timing."
   end
 end

Resources.

http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/

http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/download.html

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/

Holy Drobo!

This is the holy grail of backup. I have been looking for a solution and I might have found it. You can feed it hard drives of various sizes, without buying enclosures for the drives, and it just works. The same reason why I now only use Apple products. Because it works.

When I think of configuring a RAID array it makes me queasy, so I say get a Drobo, and don't put yourself through the headache.

Data Robotics, Inc.

I was reminded of the Drobo by this article on http://www.digg.com

http://baratunde.com/blog/archives/2007/09/please_backup_your_hard_drive_now_twice.html