[conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition & distribution, choice?

[Eric De Mund]

All,

Edmund J. Biow <biow at sbcglobal.net>:
> I'll take a closer look at rsync and rdiff-backup at some point in the
> near future.

Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:
> Ja, you know, rsync's really darned near all you need. It's pretty
> useful: "rsync -av [source] [dest]" for copying within a host, "rsync
> -avz [source] [dest]" adds gzip compression for copying across net-
> works. rdiff-backup indeed looks very similar, except being in Python
> and having special provisions for OS X resource forks.

<Eric's standard Unison plug>
I can't recommend rsync(1), at least when unison(1) is available, though
I do recognize that there is a little hump to get over when learning how
its configuration file works. I've been using unison(1) for my personal
backup and synchronization needs for some 5-7 years, now, and am very
pleased with it. I've got unison(1) replicas of my important files on my
Debian desktop, on my Debian laptop, up at my Slackware 9.x ISP, and on
my Windows XP desktop. For more information, see:

    Unison File Synchronizer
    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Here's the overview blurb from that page:

    Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It
    allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to
    be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host),
    modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the
    changes in each replica to the other.

    Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration
    management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distri-
    buted filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities
    (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).
    However, there are several points where it differs:

    1.  Unison runs on both Windows and many flavors of Unix (Solaris,
        Linux, OS X, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across
        platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a
        Unix server, for example.

    2.  Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal
        with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory struc-
        ture. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically.
        Conflicting updates are detected and displayed.

    3.  Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program:
        there is no need to modify the kernel or to have superuser pri-
        vileges on either host.

    4.  Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the inter-
        net, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling
        over an encrypted ssh connection. It is careful with network band-
        width, and runs well over slow links such as PPP connections.
        Transfers of small updates to large files are optimized using a
        compression protocol similar to rsync.

    5.  Unison is resilient to failure. It is careful to leave the
        replicas and its own private structures in a sensible state at
        all times, even in case of abnormal termination or communication
        failures.

    6.  Unison has a clear and precise specification.

    7.  Unison is free; full source code is available under the GNU
        Public License. []
</Eric's standard Unison plug>

Cheers,
Eric
--
"Half the variations which are calculated in a tournament [chess] game
turn out to be completely superfluous. Unfortunately, no one knows in
advance which half." --Jan Timman

Eric De Mund              |      Ixian Systems      |
email: <ead at ixian.com>    | 650 Castro St, #120-210 | ICQ: 811788
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