Syncing two partitions on different systems (rsync?)
 

Hello,
I'm not quite sure this message fits in this category, but I didn't know where else to post...

I'm trying to figure out what the best solution to keep two directories synced between two systems is and I thought that maybe rsync could be a good starting point. However, I don't exactly know how this might work.

I'll try to detail my situation and what I want to do below.

I've got two main computers with the following systems installed:
PC-1 OS: Windows XP HE, Ubuntu 8.04
PC-2 OS: Windows XP MCE, Ubuntu 8.04

The first one mainly runs Windows while the second almost only runs Ubuntu.

Both PCs have a dedicated partition where I store all my data. This partition uses the NTFS filesystem on one machine and FAT32 on the other.

I'd like to find a tool which runs on Linux and that let me keep the two partitions always synced. I usually work on PC-2 with Ubuntu whereas my wife works on PC-1 with Windows. Sometimes we work on the same files and I'd want the last version of each file to be saved on both machines.

I hope I have given enough information for you to answer: is rsync the right tool for me? How do I use it to achieve what I need to do?

Thanks.
A.

Hi there!

Personally I've never used rsync, but if I'm not mistaken it can only be used in one direction to propagate changes from an server to an client. I bet this can be checkd with an quick google. Since you want to sync in two directions with newer files overwriting older ones i can suggest unison to you. It can be used to sync from one system to another and can be configured to be used with conflicting changes on both sides.

If you want to sync only text-files you can take a look at svn or cvs which has better support for files which are edited on both sides.

A third alternative is the use of an samba server which shares the filesystem between the two computers.

More then enough alternatives, it's up to u to learn a bit about all three of them and find out what suits u best.

greetz,

Henry

Might also be worth ensuring both partitions have the same filesystem type.