Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Question about backing up
Eugene wrote:
> http://rsync.samba.org/ (01)
Well, these all serve different needs. There are other pieces
of software that use FTP to do tree comparisons and can work
quite well. When i wrote FileUp the
need which was not yet filled by any other tool (and I still don't
know of anything that does this, which is a rather simple
operation) is that I need to be able to check my local directory system
-only-. The other end is a blackbox, I can't install (non-web) software on it,
the connection is far too slow to do ftp file-by-file comparison, etc. (02)
When we were doing a lot of small-job contracting, there were dozens
of customers who had systems onto which we had only the barest minimum
of access and often we were running over a modem from a laptop or
the server we were accessing was doing 1 second pings. It was
hours and hours to try to run ftp-syncing for thousand-file installations. (03)
For one project, there were over 10,000 files (a large heterogenous
database thing). Most of these files never changed, but there weren't
super easy rules for which file types could be excluded and none
of the tools allowed for any regular expression include/exclude
or anything so robust. Doing a remote server comparison was
completely impossible. (04)
More simply, doing local file lists (in windows) by date can work, but
no tool that we found was able to store the last timestamp when
the tool was run and maintain the directory structure. We spent
quite a lot of time looking for something that did this and were really
surprised when we couldn't find anything. However, its easy to
not find things in this world. (05)
What FileUp is designed to do is to just keep track of the files local
to it. It saves the last time you ran that configuration, so the next time
you start it up, it knows to check since that last time, it gives you the
list which you can hand-check (another key feature my 2 users needed),
makes a zip, and ftp's it all from a single interface. (06)
In terms of doing really intelligent version management, backups, or
synching file systems, this is not the tool. FileUp has a fairly narrow
set of needs that it was designed for. But for those needs, it
is the only tool that I know of. (07)
One question I have is, if you have the ability to setup rsync, why not
just use cvs? (08)
bcl (09)