On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 08:39:58PM +0000, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
Chris G wrote:
I'm after backup rather than synchronisation so Unison doesn't really offer what I want. What I'm actually doing is to rsync files to the backup system
Sorry - don't mean to be thick here, but surely your first step is to ensure that your main machine and the backup machine are synchronised, which is (AFAIK) what both Unison and rsync do. If you're not synchronising the two machines, then surely you'd be using copy (cp) not rsync?
I'm not synchronising, no changes on the backup machine will ever get back to the client machine. If you read the manual pages for rsync it announces itself as "a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool.", it *can* synchronise but it's also a very good file copying tool. It's better than cp because it optimises the copy so that only changes are copied, if you're backing up several (hundreds of?) gigabytes this is very useful as a simple copy would take many hours.