Active Sync'ing of Files

JJamesB · 03-15-2005, 01:10 AM

I do quite a bit of digital photography, and have found that I would like to keep active syncs of my pictures on both my primary desktop, and my server and am looking for the most effective way to do so.

My server (2.8 P4, 512, 400GB, Fedora Core 3) has a directory /home/jjamesb/photos where I backup all of my photos. This server acts as DMZ and runs a web server, ssh, smb and ftp server

My Primary Desktop (Athlon 3200+, 1gb, 600GB, Fedora Core 3) has a dedicated drive mounted to /home/jjamesb/photos

I also have my laptop (Athlon64 3400, 1GB, 100GB, Windows XP Pro) acts as a field offloading device. I also use SAMBA to offload files onto the server

My goal is to be able to have files downloaded to my desktop synced at the end of the night with the server, so I have an active backup that is no older than 1 day, however I would also like to be able to FTP into my server from the outside, upload photographs, and at the end of the night have those same photographs synced back to the desktop... there will be no editing done on the server, and no editing done on the laptop, so there shouldn't be any duplicated files which are different.

My question becomes... am I asking too much? It would seem as though this would be a fairly common operation with a "workgroup" based file server. Does anybody know of any free / open source software that will make this possible, or at least point me in the right direction of a solution.

gerardt · 03-15-2005, 03:14 AM

Have a look at Novell's iFolder which was released into OSS last year. It only does peer to peer as the Enterprise backend is their commercial product.

oneandoneis2 · 03-15-2005, 03:56 AM

You could have a partition on the server that's shared over the network - so the files don't need any syncing, as you're always working on the originals, regardless of which computer you're on.

theYinYeti · 03-15-2005, 07:16 AM

You may look into "distributed filesystems", such as AFS, or CodaFS. Several are included in the default kernel.

Yves.

JJamesB · 03-15-2005, 09:04 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by oneandoneis2
You could have a partition on the server that's shared over the network - so the files don't need any syncing, as you're always working on the originals, regardless of which computer you're on.

The only problem with that is that I wouldn't have redundancy on the drives, which is what I am looking for

Thanks for the quick response, I will take a look at your suggestions when I get back from work

-Jordan