I know enough about rsync & Co to be dangerous but before putting all my eggs in that basket and committing fully I’d like to hear your opinion.
I have two Macs, one in the office and another at home, which I would like to keep synchronized via a server that belongs to our institute. I can mount my own directory on it using the samba protocol so that this directory appears in my Finder (smb://etcpp….)
Most of the stuff I work with on a daily basis is either imported in DTPO or lives in the filesystem of my Mac. My idea was to use either rsync or unison to sync my files in order to keep the traffic to a minimum.
Now, do I need to worry about critical metadata getting lost by storing my files on the server? I thought about putting the mission critical files into a sparseimage first and sync that, but perhaps that would be overkill.
Obviously, I’d need to shut down all programs before syncing with the server but by the time I have arrived home, the transfer should be done.
What do you think, sounds good or am I missing something important? Any suggestions highly welcome.
Prion
Depending on the server, extended attributes (e.g. OpenMeta tags) and Spotlight/Finder comments might not survive the process. However, this shouldn’t have any impact on DEVONthink as DEVONthink is using its own internal copies for comments/tags and adds them again while exporting.
How do you ensure that the transfer is indeed already done?
Nice as they may be, I don’t use OpenMeta tags for fear that Apple may pull the plug on them one day. Are there other things that might break and that I should be aware of when storing files directly in the server’s filesystem, i.e. without creating a sparseimage with its own filesystem first?
Nice, I didn’t even know that. Deveonthink, always one more ace up its sleeve…
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Good question and one that I should have a good answer to before starting to pull the data from the server after arriving home.
I could log into my Mac at work remotely and check the log if there are any error messages.
In the long run I will try to automate this process so that when the transfer has gone through without errors an email be sent telling me so.
Other possible issues are missing support for resource forks (e.g. older .textClipping and .webloc files have only a resource fork) and invalid filenames (e.g. certain characters not supported or only short filenames supported).
