Differential File Copy to FTP

mbritojr · 02-05-2009, 06:57 PM

I'm fairly new to Linux (I have a three week old installation of Fedora 10 on my HP Compaq 6710b and it is amazing), so bear with me here...

On my Windows XP boxes I would use nightly RoboCopy script to copy files in a directory to a server. RoboCopy transfers only those files from the source directory that are new or with newer "Last Modified" dates than the files in the destination directory on the server (a differential file-level copy). A nightly script on the server would then transfer the RoboCopy'd data to an ftp server at a remote site (a full copy).

This worked great when my environment was small and didn't include Linux boxes...now my solution isn't cutting it. There is too much data for the server to send to the FTP site in less than 24 hours and I don't know how to perform a RoboCopy-style operation from my Linux box to a CIFS share.

MY QUESTION: is there any sort of native Linux command or package that operates like RoboCopy? Is there any sort of software utility that can perform a differential file-level copy directly to an FTP site?

I'd prefer something that performs raw differential file-level copy, basically directory mirroring using FTP as the destination.

P.S. I've seen software that creates differentials across backup sets (eg. a file selection being compressed into full.bak followed by incrementals.bak) and uploads them to an FTP but that won't work for me.

jailbait · 02-05-2009, 07:11 PM

The rsynch command will do what you want. See the rsynch man pages:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync

One of the examples in the man page is:

Code:

I mirror a directory between my lqoldrq and lqnewrq ftp sites with the command:

CWrsync -az -e ssh --delete ~ftp/pub/samba nimbus:"~ftp/pub/tridge"

This is launched from cron every few hours.

-----------------------
Steve Stites

mbritojr · 02-05-2009, 07:26 PM

Doesn't 'rsync' require that the destination host run 'ssh'? I want to make a differential copy of a local directory to a remote server via FTP.

jschiwal · 02-05-2009, 07:36 PM

You could use tar with the -g <snapshot-file> option to create an incremental archive and then on the next line ftp the backup to the server.

See the info manual for tar. Section 5.2 covers Incremental Dumps. If the target server doesn't use a linux/unix filesystem, you would want to use a linux archive anyway to preserve ownership and permissions of the files.