Why I love Linux, part 2075209863
My Ubuntu installation greeted me today with this offer to upgrade from EdgyEft to FeistyFawn (love those nicknames).
I should also note that my Big Nerd Change this spring, using rsync to keep my files synchronized between my two home and work computers, with wrecking.org as intermediary, has been wonderful. Unlike every other year I’m heading into summer without a massive hand synchronization and weeding out to do (or, more likely, to neglect). And of course having my files in four places means backup is automatic.
April 20th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Hmm…I’d like to hear more about this. I’m using SuperDuper! to make a bootable backup of my whole MacOS partition once a week, but an rsync-based system like the one you’re using would be handy for backing up dissertation stuff. Would you mind sharing details?
April 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I’d love to hear more about this as well.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Sure. I started this here, but realized a separate web page would be a lot better. I welcome feedback or questions.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Bradley, thanks for this. I’m testing it out now, syncing my ~/Documents/research folder to my home directory on U-Va’s file server. It seems to be working fine, despite the fact that the server and I are running different versions of SSH and rsync.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Cool. If you figure out or find the smart scripting stuff, do share.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Well, it looks to me like on your Linux boxes you’ll want to use bash + cron. You could do the same on Erin’s Mac, though I’ve just set up my backups using the bash + iCal method detailed here: http://www.macinstruct.com/node/85. It works fine.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Oh, and I’m glad you pointed me to that; I forgot about Macs and their silly resource forks. I’ll need to modify Erin’s backup thusly.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:24 am
For what it’s worth, I can’t get the “preserve resource forks” switch to work, either using -E or –extended-attributes. I get errors like this:
rsync: -avE: unknown option
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1023)
Edit: Dammit. I found the problem. I had installed RsyncX, which hijacks the PATH for the rsync command. The -E flag works with the version of rsync that ships with Tiger, i.e. /usr/bin/rsync.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Are you writing of a sync to UVa? Last night I tried this to wrecking.org; seems Dreamhost doesn’t have -E support compiled in.
RsyncX? That’s what you get for not using the command line, kemosabe.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Yeah, I know. I’ve uninstalled it.
I’m syncing to U-Va (rsync 2.6.3pre1 on AIX) and to an external HFS+-formatted hard drive. Dreamhost is running 2.6.4, right? Odd that that feature wouldn’t work. I’m getting an error message, too, when I try to sync to ambiguities.org:
rsync: on remote machine: -vlogDtprE: unknown option
I also don’t see any reference to -E or –extended-attributes in the man file on postac.
It might be worth an email to customer support; I can’t imagine you and I are the only people who might want this to work.
Two other thoughts:
1. you could compile another copy of rsync (or grab an appropriate binary with -E support compiled in), put in in your home directory on wrecking.org, and use the –rsync-path flag to point to that copy.
2. you could follow the instructions at http://www.onthenet.com.au/~q/rsync/ and use the –hfs-export and –hfs-import flags.
On the other hand, if you’re just backing up data like I am, I don’t know how important the resource fork stuff really is.