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from the a-one-and-a-two-and-a-three-and-a dept.
FOSS developer Michael Stapelberg has started a four part blog post on Rsync and how it works. He wrote the i3 tiling window manager, among other projects, and is a former Debian developer. Now he has written about three scenarios for which he has come to appreciate Rsync, specifically in DokuWiki transfers, software deployment, and backups. Then he looks at at integrating it into various work flows, and then at what the software and protocol actually do. The fourth section is to be announced.
Rsync is an algorithm and a utilty, both initially developed by Andrew Tridgell as part of his PhD dissertation work, and by Paul Mackerras. It is used for updating files on one machine so that they become identical to a file on another machine while at the same time transferring the minimal amount of data to effect the update, saving on time and bandwidth. Rsync is the underlying component in a great many backup utilities and routines. With the right settings it can even do incremental backups. Andrew is also well-known for having worked on Samba, and won in the EU against M$ in order to get the required interoperability specifications needed to share files using CIFS/SMB.
Previously:
(2014) Ask Soylent: Suggestions for Remote Backup
(2014) How Do You Sync Your Home Directory?
(Score: 3, Disagree) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 30 2022, @03:57PM
One improvement I'd like to see in rsync is better handling of unsupported attributes. Too often, when copying to FAT, rsync spews a bunch of warnings that it has simply dropped the attributes that FAT can't support. If rsync has an option to save that info somehow, like to a text file, seems like it should be default behavior.