sync files two way direction

[deech]

hi,

how can i sync files between 2 pc's.. It's mainly for backup purposes, but the concerning files can be edited on both machines....

Here's my setup:

a desktop pc with a FAT32 dir containing my photo's. I edit my photo's on this PC.

a laptop with linux also containing the same photos on a ext3 part.. I also edit photos on this machine and take them with me to show to ppl.

Is there a way to sync the files between these 2 pc's. If i change a photo on my fat32 partition it should be synced to my laptop and the other way around....
(i hope this makes sense)

anyone who can help?

Greetz,

deech

[Jman]

rsysc does very good incremental file transfer, and I think it can go both ways. Frequently it's used to mirror websites and things. Not sure how helpful the examples are, however.

Anybody have a two-way rsync backup script they could share?

[7_Dots]

rsync is a uni-directional tool, or mirroring tool. The program you want is called unison


http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.html

[kd_pease]

It's true that a single run of rsync is one way, but for a 2 way sync using rsync you should be able to use:

#Copy updated files from local to remote machine
rsync -e ssh -vr /path/to/local/dir remote-hostname:/path/to/remote/dir
#Copy updated files from remote machine to local machine
rsync -e ssh -vr remote-hostname:/path/to/remote/dir /path/to/local/dir

You can drop the -v if you want - it just provides more info about what's going on.

You can run it from either of the 2 machines as and when required.

[CrystalCowboy]

Yes, you can run rsync from either end. The complication is that if you have files A, B and C in your directory, and you most recently edited file A on host1 and most recently edited file B on host2, rsync needs to know that it should not overwrite a file on the target that is newer than one on the source. It appears that the -u option might turn that trick.

I typically run rsync with the -avz options for Linux-to-Linux, which preserves symbolic links and file creation times. If one filesystem is FAT32, I would substitute the -rltv options. rsync can be run from one directory to another (even with a remotely mounted disk) or over the network. See the man page for a good summary.

I am not familiar with the unison application, I presume it figures out for you which host has the newer version of a file.*

You didn't specifically mention, but is the PC with a FAT32 disk running Windows? You can get rsync for Windows if you are running Cygwin. Rsync comes standard with Linux, and is available for most brands of Unix, including MacOS X.

update:
* I checked out that web page for [/b]Unison[/b], and it claims to do just that. The down side is that it is not included with Linux and does not have a lenghty positive track record, as rsync does. I presume if it does what is claimed for it, it should catch on nicely.