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Shapeshifter

Member

Registered: 2008-03-11

Posts: 230

Need advice! Syncing regularly used files...

I have a desktop and a notebook and I use both for similar tasks, though I prefer using the desktop at home and obviously the notebook everyday when not at home. I have a couple of folders with my work stuff in them, and now I'd like to have access to the same files on both machines, but without the huge speed loss + availability problem of using a dedicated server to store the files on. I need them synced as smoothly as possible. I also have a high bandwidth attached server at my disposal. How I think it should work :

- I save a file - it gets saved to the local hard drive an queued for syncing.
- When there's idle I/O and bandwidth, it should sync to the server
- When I'm at home, both machines are running, so it should either directly sync to the other machine, or the other machine should receive the changed stuff directly after syncing to the server, so that it can access the synced stuff immediately
- When the machine is powered down it should obviously sync the local cache to the server if possible
- When a machine is powered up, it should detect changes and syn immediately

So, it would be some sort of network-filesystem/rsync hybrid. The problem with a netfs is that I don't always have an internet connection to get data from the server and also, transfers are slow. Problem with a pure schedule-based sync is, that stuff will not appear on the other machine instantaneously. So what I imagine is having a netfs which caches locally. This would be ideal:

- Having a mount, e.g. /mnt/sync
- When copying to that directory, stuff will get written to a local dir and synced to the server whenever possible
- The other machine also has this mount, which displays all the stuff on the server, but also a local copy.

--> This way, it will be very fast to access and write plus it's very simple to access.

So! Is there such a thing? I looked at rsync, unison and afs and I guess I could hack something together with a set of scripts and things like that, but maybe there's already exactly that thing out there... Anyone?

Last edited by Shapeshifter (2009-03-30 19:28:00)

bender02

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 1,328

Re: Need advice! Syncing regularly used files...

Well, you can try using dropbox service. I doesn't fulfill all the requirements you have, but it comes (in my opinion) pretty close, although there might be some showstopper for you. Anyway, have a look. (And if you're interested, let me give you a referral, we both get a bit more space