OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/21315/Synchronizing_Any_Two_Machines_Using_rsync Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:13:50 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com There are some nice / simple GUI apps... http://osnews.com/thread?358740 http://osnews.com/thread?358740 ...for both Windows and OSX that use RSYNC...

DeltaCopy (Windows) - http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

Carbon Copy Cloner (OSX) - http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Mike Bombich's site also includes a tutorial on doing remote backups of OSX using RSYNC. Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mrhasbean) Comments Unison http://osnews.com/thread?358742 http://osnews.com/thread?358742 For laptop-desktop synchronization where you might change different things on each computer, I like Unison:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

(It's cross-platform, open source, with Windows, gtk2, and Mac OS X GUIs.) Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cristoper) Comments RE: There are some nice / simple GUI apps... http://osnews.com/thread?358753 http://osnews.com/thread?358753 Carbon Copy Cloner uses rsync? That's cool - I've used it for 2 or 3 years and didn't realize that. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (StephenBeDoper) Comments rsnapshot http://osnews.com/thread?358783 http://osnews.com/thread?358783 For backing up my laptop to my external hard disk, haven't found a better tool than rsnapshot:

http://rsnapshot.org/

I just run it in my cron. Unlike the other rsync-related tools the author mentions, it is mature, well-maintained and gives access to all the underlying rsync options if you so choose.Edited 2009-04-16 04:01 UTC Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Hypnos) Comments Passwordless + Secure rsync http://osnews.com/thread?358801 http://osnews.com/thread?358801 If you are interested in using automated (i.e : passwordless) rsync backup while keeping it fairly secured, you might be interested in the following :

http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2008/05/07/securing-automated-rsync-over-...

so that you can make your own 1-click backup or, even better, schedule it through cron (unix/linux) or Scheduled Tasks (Windows).

Of course you can't use rsync alone to do your backups (for one thing, you once synchronized, you won't be able to have a previous version of a file, for example if it got corrupted).

The following article provides a way to get this feature and some more by using rsync + a Solaris 10 machine as the backup server :

http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2008/07/05/backups-a-personnal-implementa... Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (killermouse0) Comments RE: Passwordless + Secure rsync http://osnews.com/thread?358806 http://osnews.com/thread?358806 It is easy to set up rsnapshot (see my comment above) to use ssh transport.

A page specifically about this topic:

http://troy.jdmz.net/rsnapshot/

Using rsnapshot is much more convenient than using rsync alone. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Hypnos) Comments Backups with rsync + zfs http://osnews.com/thread?358818 http://osnews.com/thread?358818 As someone else pointed out rsync alone is usually not good enough. The really interesting solution is when you combine rsync with open solaris zfs. For more details see http://milek.blogspot.com/2009/02/backup-tool.html Edited 2009-04-16 10:08 UTC Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (milek) Comments RE: Unison http://osnews.com/thread?358825 http://osnews.com/thread?358825 Unison is an excellent program; I simply couldn't be without it. Rsync is great for one-way stuff like backups, but when you are working on two machines regularly (not just one of them) then Unison comes into its own and is extremely helpful.

If you use a central server as one of the endpoints in the Unison synchronisation, you can synchronise >2 machines. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (matatk) Comments gadmintools.org http://osnews.com/thread?358838 http://osnews.com/thread?358838 http://gadmintools.flippedweb.com/index.php?option=com_content&...

Gadmin-rsync looks nice too. I haven't tried it yet but looks like it could be a decent GUI rsync tool. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Calipso) Comments System clocks? http://osnews.com/thread?358853 http://osnews.com/thread?358853 I'm going to guess that the system clocks on the two systems should be set correctly. Most people take NTP for granted, but I've run into more than a few problems with Linux being unable to update the hardware clock and that causing various problems. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (theosib) Comments The problem... http://osnews.com/thread?358877 http://osnews.com/thread?358877 The problem I have with rsync is that it doesn't preserve all file attributes when pulling a backup from a linux to a windows machine.
Well, creating a tar archive on the linux machine and just pulling that one over rsync helps, but that's not a very good solution, any suggestions? Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (xnoreq) Comments RE: The problem... http://osnews.com/thread?358903 http://osnews.com/thread?358903 rsnapshot, pci-sata adaptor, for some reason
seems quicker than ide (master ) > ide (slave)
with rsnapshot.
...........
the post above I am replying to though, "windows",
you may consider the shareware Bootit. I use it
for image backup (it does BATCH!) of fat32 and
freebsd partitions. I also use it to format
a FS to "freebsd" (it is in the dropdown menu if
one knows beforehand) before installing so so when
the somewhat arcane freebsd installer operates, I know
precisely where to install. Slightly costly (35$) but
way easy. Initially bought it in the 1990's when
knowledgable persons raved about it in Usenet. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (J-freebsd_98) Comments RE[2]: The problem... http://osnews.com/thread?359418 http://osnews.com/thread?359418
rsnapshot, pci-sata adaptor, for some reason
seems quicker than ide (master ) > ide (slave)
with rsnapshot.


Well, duh! Only a single device can be active on an IDE channel at a time. So you read data from the master to a buffer, then write to the slave. It's a half-duplex operation. It'll always be faster to use two separate IDE channels (read from primary master, stream directly to secondary master), or any two separate I/O channels. Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (phoenix) Comments