15 Sep
1999
15 Sep
'99
6:52 p.m.
rsync is an extremely useful tool, by the same person who gave us samba (Andrew Tridgell). It can be found at: http://rsync.samba.org/ It does a great job of copying only the bits that have changed. I use it as a poor man's snapmirror ;-)
It's also a little dangerous in a mixed protocol environment -- because it depend on NFS reads only, it will happily strip any CIFS-isms from any file.
The other problem with it is that if you've got lots of files, it tends to consume vast amounts of memory. Last time I used it for syncing a large volume (over 3M files), it required about 600 megs of memory (for which swap works fine).
But it you're in a unix-only environment, and you can live with this sort of thing, it's great.
Nick