Slashdot Mirror

Oh, some luser with mod points got all pissy-poo over the obvious truth being stated. Predictable. Here you go, you poor, delicate snowflakes.

I use it for the convenience, I like it as well.

But for a mainly Linux using shell person like me, what it's doing isn't rocket science - it wouldn't take much effort just to use a tool like rsync to copy browser settings from my home directory from one PC to another. Even on a Windows PC, I could mount a Windows drive on Linux using Samba and use rsync with that also - or just use DeltaCopy on Windows as an rsync client to a Linux rsync server.

Actually encryption doesn't guarantee *things add up* after transfer. And ssh does not guarantee things add up any more than tcp does. It does have other advantages, like compression.

And tcp is just not a good file transfer protocol over microwave links. Sure you can fix the glaring issues, using huge windows, you can even change registry settings to improve the situation : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224829.

Making it work really well, though, you'll need

If you're worried about correctness of transfer you might want to use rsync for windows, which *does* check correctness. You might want to use an interface like http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp.

Now rsync is no wonder. It is not something that is constantly trying to reconnect. You start it once ... it tries once. If you want an opportunistic reliable file transfer utility ... you might want to try bittorrent, it's quite good at that.

Meh,

The 'My Documents' folder on my (Vista-based) laptop does an rsync via ssh to a server at work every 15 minutes so I don't have to worry about transporting my laptop to/from work + I can 'pick up' stuff if I 'forget' it.

I use Deltacopy for the syncing.

Works a treat!

This same thing was asked roughly 9 months ago which got me thinking about my own solution. At first I was going to set up something like FreeNAS in a VM (easy backup, save states, etc.) but soon realized I needed more.

What I have now is a dedicated machine with four 500 gig HDDs in RAID 0+1 (I wanted 1+0 but I couldn't find the option and it's too late now).

In addition to a place on the network to store all my excessive files I can also use it for things like downloading media with Miro and sharing the media with TVersity, which allows me to stream media to my 360 etc.

In addition I added an RSYNC relationship (with deltacopy) between it and my primary PC for backing up and it is running JungleDisk (attached to Amazon's S3) for auto backup offsite.

It also is there if I want to rip and re-encode a DVD to DivX but still use my main machine for something else.

This is probably more than you were asking for but it is working pretty well for me.

If you wanted a low-power solution you could set all the above up with one of those mini-itx VIA boards (just buy a bulky enough PSU). The only devices I have are the five HDDs and a rarely used DVD-ROM. It doesn't actually take a lot of watts even with a normal board.

VIA mini-itx resource:
http://www.mini-itx.com/

DeltaCopy:
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

Miro:
http://www.getmiro.com/

TVersity:
http://tversity.com/

JungleDisk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/

Amazon S3:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

gui for rsync in windows: http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth. In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a "Windows Friendly" wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. "rsync" is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typicall require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration.

http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp