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I'm traveling all the time (every 2-3 months, I'm in a new city or country), with no real permanent address. I've managed to work out all the kinks over the last couple of years...except having a good backup/sync solution.

I have a macbook pro & a thinkpad w701 (which runs two different VMs). It's a pain in the ass because making changes on one machine (such as adding some new music or updating some presentations) requires me to keep track of what changed where. And then every couple of weeks, after syncing the three different images, I try to manually sync it out to a backup drive that I carry around.

It's pretty much the most annoying thing ever...especially when I sometimes make changes on the backup drive and I have to remember not to override them.

What I'd really like is something simple that has more of a version control like workflow:

  • I can push out changes to some central server (like a commit. Example: I add some changes to my music directory and then I can just commit those changes to backup)

  • Before the backup happens, I'd like to see a "diff": what files will be overridden, which one's newer, etc

  • I can access my files off the server (if I'm making an audio mix and need to pull out some songs, I'd like to get them from the server. All the backups can't just be one big binary compressed zip blob)

Dropbox comes pretty close but it lacks the "commit" & "diff" functionality. I thought about using Amazon AWS but that falls short because I can't see diffs and can't access my files directly off aws.

Any ideas? Or any other solutions? I guess what I'd really like is TimeMachine in the cloud or maybe even a NAS that's securely accessible through the internet

ikrima
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2 Answers2

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You might want to use rsync. It's a unix synchronization tool you can use it on windows and unix variants (including Mac OS X). It uses delta copying to minimize transfer and hardlinks to minimize backup size.

You can access all files in every backup as though they were normal files. Diffing can be done using traditional tools. It is all command-line based so if you don't want that you will need to find GUI tools, but I don't know which you could use.

You would need a server with a rsync deamon/service. I don't know if there are providers for it but you can set up your own VPS starting at a few dollars a month.

dtech
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  • If you need two-way sync, you can use unison, don't forget to do a 'copy' on the server, as well! – Arafangion Mar 14 '11 at 14:21
  • what's a good tool to do diff compare for directory differences/changes? (I found the actual source control ones like kdiff or windiff to be terrible with large amounts of binary files) – ikrima Mar 14 '11 at 21:37
  • Some GUI's have options to ignore or only note binary files, you need to turn those on. But it's true that they are meant to show changes in text files. – dtech Mar 14 '11 at 22:54
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Have you looked at Amazon S3? S3 is data storage mechanism and there are bunch of tools to "sync" your local directory with S3. Some of the tools are:

http://www.vinodlive.com/2007/08/20/amazon-s3-storage-tools/

Out of these , S3Sync should do what you are looking for, I.e. submit only changed files and a mode that would tell you changes before submitting them.

Shamit Verma
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