Comments on: Why I love Linux, part 2075209863

By: Erich

Erich — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:34:17 +0000

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.

By: cbd

cbd — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:25:06 +0000

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.

By: Erich

Erich — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:24:34 +0000

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.

By: cbd

cbd — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:02:52 +0000

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.

By: Erich

Erich — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:43:18 +0000

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.

By: cbd

cbd — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:14:29 +0000

Cool. If you figure out or find the smart scripting stuff, do share.

By: Erich

Erich — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:10:59 +0000

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.

By: cbd

cbd — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:11:14 +0000

Sure. I started this here, but realized a separate web page would be a lot better. I welcome feedback or questions.

By: John

John — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:27:25 +0000

I’d love to hear more about this as well.

By: Erich

Erich — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:26:20 +0000

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?