Dev.SN

How Do You Sync Your Home Directory?

posted by janrinok on Monday March 24 2014, @08:45PM   

digitalderbs writes:

"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"

• rsync not so bad... rsync not so bad... (Score: 4, Informative) by kebes on Monday March 24 2014, @10:16PM

  by kebes (1505) on Monday March 24 2014, @10:16PM (#20695)

  I have some rsync scripts that run via cron jobs (on all the computers I care about). It's based on tutorials like this one [mikerubel.org] or this script [faqs.org]. With a few simple commands, you can set it up to do incremental backups (without wasting space with duplicate backups for files that don't change); and you can have multiple backups (local and remote). The basic backup protects you against catastrophic disk deaths, and the incremental aspect gives you a bit of protection against things like accidental deletion. Everything is available via SSH/SFTP. And everything is under my control (purely living on computers I manage).
  
  Now, doing it with hand-coded bash scripts is admittedly a bit arcane and even brittle. I must admit that I have to periodically check that everything is still working correctly. I have to keep in mind where my files are stored. And it's not realtime syncing (you can make the backups as frequent as you want, but it's not syncing on every file change). On the other hand, backup is sufficiently important that you should be checking on it regularly in any case. And I like using low-level commands and scripts that I am in full control of: again, backup is sufficiently important that I like being able to know exactly what's going on. And SSH/SFTP access to files just seems like the most universal (while still being secure).
  
  I do long for a more transparent and realtime solution, where my files would be automagically synced and up-to-date, across devices, always available, from anywhere. I've heard about cool versioning file systems (and ideas like using version control systems for your entire home directory, not just source code), but they've never seemed robust and universal enough that I could use them across all my computers, while still having as easy access to my files when sitting down at a totally new computer.
  
  In short, I would love to learn about some elegant and powerful solutions. But until then, rsync+ssh+cron are a remarkably powerful and versatile solution for me.

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• Re:rsync not so bad... (Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:45AM

  by SlimmPickens (1056) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:45AM (#20798)

  Not that I use it, but inotify [wikipedia.org] looks like it should work for you.

  Parent