Over the last couple of days I’ve been experimenting a bit with different backup methods. To begin, I did try out ExecutiveSync and its successor You Syncronize but they are very, very slow. Not only did the first synchronizing of a 0.5 Gb Folder between two computers over our Airport-network took over 2.5 hrs, but also on subsequent syncs the checking of the database seems to last forever.

So I turned to the fink project again and did find two interesting packages : wget . GNU Wget is a free network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, so one way to backup a folder would be to put it in the Sites folder and mirror it over the network using wget. I did’t check this out in great details (did a small test to see it working but I assume it will be slow for large folders). The other one is rsync It uses the “rsync algorithm” which provides a very fast method for remote files into sync. It does this by sending just the differences in the files across the link, without requiring that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand. This seems to be precisely what I wanted to do and after a google for ‘rsync OS X’ I arrived at the RsyncX package which is an implementation of rsync with HFS support and configuration through a command line (Terminal) or graphical user interface. I downloaded this package and the GUI seems to be placed in the Applications/Utilities and tried it out by filling out the Source and Local Folders and pressing the synchronize button. Not much progress was reported but the Activity Monitor showed that it was using up all of the CPU so I was patient for over an hour and then looked for the Network Activity in the Activity Monitor and virtually no packets were going in or out, so I killed RsyncX. I am sure I did something wrong but rather than trying to get it working, I tried the command-line rsync-command I downloaded from Fink. After a few false attempts I typed

/sw/bin/rsync -a -e ssh
iMatrixLieven.local:/Users/lieven/Documents
/Users/lieven/docsLieven

and suddenly the packets were flying happily over the network at 250 Kb/sec, so it took me only half an hour to get a first synchronization done and subsequent changes are added in no time! Afterwards I discovered that rsync is included in the standard OS X Developers Tools as RsyncX seems to have replaced it to rsync_orig and installed a new (quite large) rsync in /usr/bin. Maybe my problems with RsyncX were caused because I have /sw/bin earlier in my $PATH than /usr/bin but verifying this will have to await another day. For the moment, I’m happy to have a quick syncronizing tool available and Real Madrid is playing on the TV…

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apple, google, mac, OSX

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Posted in mac
Written on Wed, 10 March 2004 at 9:25 pm
Tags: apple, google, mac, OSX
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