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Ask Slashdot: How Best To Synchronize Projects Between Shared Drive and PCs?
Koookiemonster writes "Our company has many projects, each one with a folder on a Samba drive (Z:\). Our problem is syncing only the programmers' current projects (~30 at any time) between Z:\ and their C:\Projects\-folder on five Windows 7 laptops. If we sync the whole Z:\-drive, our projects folders would be filled with too many subfolders, making it difficult to navigate. The folders contain OpenPCS projects (PLC) and related files (Word, Excel, PDF documents); a common project folder is 50 MB. Is there any easy to use, low-budget sync software with scripting, so that we could e.g. only sync folders that exist locally?" (Read more details, below, of what Koookiemonster is looking for.)
"Many programs do support selective sync, but choosing what to sync is awkward; projects and who works on them change daily. It is important that subscribing to a project is as easy as copying it from Z:\ to C:\projects\. The Z:\-folder with all of our current and past projects is located on a desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. It can share files e.g. via Samba or FTP. All PCs are on the same (W)LAN. Off-site backups of Z:\ are taken care of via rsync. The company has three programmers, who usually handle their own projects alone, but very often others need to add files to projects. Bigger projects need more programmers. Currently we use FreeFileSync with a custom piece of Javascript to make batch files that synchronize e.g. folders C:\projects\123_ProjectName\ and Z:\123_ProjectName\ if the local folder exists. However, that solution lacks versioning, real-time sync and deletion support. It only syncs when we press a button, and then older files are overwritten by newer files (two way sync; older files go to a "sync-deletions"-folder).
PS. Bonus points for solutions that allow renaming project folders without renaming them on all laptops."
PS. Bonus points for solutions that allow renaming project folders without renaming them on all laptops."
USE VERSION CONTROL!!!!
Git
Mercurial
Perforce
Subversion
Vesta
CVS
ClearCase
VSS
StarTeam
The choices are legion. What you are doing is not a choice.
Pick a version control system and your life will be much easier (after the learning curve).
Sounds exactly like what an RCS like Subversion is good for.
Each user pulls down the directories relevant to him/her from the overall repository, updates at will from the central source, and pushes up changes at will with a couple of mouse clicks.
TortoiseSVN will even give you handy little icons on your local folders in Explorer to tell you if what you have in your local directory isn't synced with the central server, and it's two clicks to make that happen. I actually think you don't want to "force synchronization" on an ongoing basis, seems like a great way to overwrite a lot of your developers' (and others') ongoing work.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
stop trying, use git instead
... or one of the many alternatives.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Syncing files like this is a mess. Perhaps you should look beyond share drives. You are trying to solve the technical problem, but if you step back you might see a business problem. Consider 3 alternative approaches:
1) Keep the files on the share drive and do not mirror them locally.
2) Use a source control system (Ex: GIT, TFS, Subversion)
3) Use a groupware / content management system / document management system. ( Ex: Sharepoint, Confluence, QDMS, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Drupal, SAP, Groupwise)
Knowing the right terms helps find the software you need. Here are some links to Wikipedia which has the right terms, and some lists of software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Management_Systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software#Comparison_of_notable_software
svn is appealing in this case because you can check out subdirectories of a repo without downloading the whole thing, which is more similar to his current organization.
You apparently don't have the slightest clue how git works, nor how to use it properly. I certainly am no git guru, but have no issues with using multiple git repos in projects, building sub-systems out of it, nor branching and merging, which it truly excels at. I wouldn't wish SVN on anyone that wants to use branching. It's about as brain-dead as it can get and still "function", barely. The only thing SVN has going for it is that it is almost atomic, whereas CVS, MKS, etc, absolutely aren't. ClearCase is a separate system that can be used, but requires a full time expert admin for anything more than basic code repos. At least it handles branching almost sensibly. Mercurial was in the running, but at the time git had (and still has) a larger user base with active improvements in various tools associated with it for my needs, thus I chose git.
Learn a tool before you wrongly despise it publicly. You are wrong on every count:
Lastly, you can essentially "checkin" every change for a full history of what you did on a local branch, revert, merge other branches, etc, with no effect on the main dev branch(es). And you can do all this without even being connected to a "main" server. Maintaining parallel branches with constant merges is cake compared to SVN and other central repo schemes. There really is no situation where I'd rather use SVN or anything like it that I can think of, when I have a choice.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Perhaps you haven't spent enough time with git. I've used it for years to manage data stores with content ranging from rST documentation bound for rendering to a very widely read open source "howto" site (with constant edits and merges from a small team of technical writers) to large scale development projects. In fact, I use it for all my file and source control to this day, and my employer's dev group uses it as well to manage a rather extensive codebase responsible for driving an enterprise cloud hosting provider's operations.
If you've had problems with git, you should be aware that there's a huge community out there ready and willing to assist you with whatever workflow you've decided to adopt. One of the nicer things about git is the fact that you can use it in a very SVN-like manner if you like, or you can make as many branches as you want and manage things in a very distributed manner. Again, I suspect your primary problem is lack of experience.
Write failed: Broken pipe