Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 84.9.2.245]
on August 01, 2007 11:22 AM
Rsync only does one-way synchronisation, i.e. the file is copied from A to B, overwriting the B copy. In the context of this article, this is probably fine since you always want the new version on the laptop to overwrite the old version on the backup server (though it would be better if the backup server had proper version control, so that you could also recover old versions).
But if you want to keep a laptop synchronised with a desktop machine, where files may be modified on either machine, you might like to check out "unison". It uses the rsync protocol to transfer files, but does full two-way synchronisation. I.e. when A and B are synchronised, A overwrites B if A has been modified, whereas B overwrites A if B has been modified (if both have been modified, unison asks you what it should do, or whether it should skip this file, and lets you view the files, diff them, etc.). It's possible to partially mock this up using rsync, but it's error prone and unison does it much better, so why not use it? Unison comes with both command-line and graphical interfaces, and works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris... (and can synchronise files between them).
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Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 84.9.2.245] on August 01, 2007 11:22 AMBut if you want to keep a laptop synchronised with a desktop machine, where files may be modified on either machine, you might like to check out "unison". It uses the rsync protocol to transfer files, but does full two-way synchronisation. I.e. when A and B are synchronised, A overwrites B if A has been modified, whereas B overwrites A if B has been modified (if both have been modified, unison asks you what it should do, or whether it should skip this file, and lets you view the files, diff them, etc.). It's possible to partially mock this up using rsync, but it's error prone and unison does it much better, so why not use it? Unison comes with both command-line and graphical interfaces, and works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris... (and can synchronise files between them).
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