File copy program

At 12:40 PM -0700 2005/09/26, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
>I'm looking for a mac tool that is similar to the Windows tool Robocopy:
>
><http://www.ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html>
>
>I know rsync can do many of these things (better even), but these files are
>going to drives mounted on a Linux server using Netatalk to handle the
>resource forks. To my knowledge rsync server on Linux won't work with
>resource forks from rsync on OS X.
Kevin,

        If you use RsyncX or PsyncX (Tiger's rsync seems broken)
against an AFP mount, you don't need any rsync support on the server
-- just AppleShare. Synk or Qdea's Synchronize Plus should do the
trick.

http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html
http://psyncx.sourceforge.net/

        You only get the magical partial-copy efficiency of rsync
using client-server mode (such as ssh, rsh, or an actual 'rsyncd'
server), but if you can do without that, there are many options,
including standard Mac tools like Retrospect, Qdea's Synchronize, and
Synk.


                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

--On September 26, 2005 1:44:12 PM -0600 Nik <gerberinik.net> wrote:

> I may be missing out on some key point of complexity here, but I believe
> that pretty much any of the various synchronization tools out there can
> handle what you want. I've had good success with Synchronize Pro X from
> Qdea. I've heard good things about Super Duper too.
>
> http://www.qdea.com/
> http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

I've been looking at synchronization programs and they may handle it but
most seem designed around drive or directory backup, which I could use but
I also want the quick one off move this file to there reliably. Single file
selection is sometimes impossible, or very difficult in Sync programs. Drag
and drop from Finder seems to fail a lot over slow links.

Super Duper looks nice as a backup program but selecting a single directory
is a pain as you have to setup a script that deslects all the directories
you don't want. Also I haven't figured out how to get it to select a
network drive as destination (it only lists local drives or a disk images
as destination option). Also I believe it wipes the auto-deletes missing
files so if I tell it to copy one file to a directory it wipes the other
files.

I haven't tested Synchronize Pro X yet, it looks promising. I've been
testing ChronoSync which is also nice and has a similar feature set.
ChronoSync has been choking on a 10GB file I've been testing with (so has
cp and drag and drop from finder so I don't believe this is a ChronoSync
issue as much as a network issue.) At $30 ChronoSync is the price range I
had in mind vs. Synchronize Pro X's $99.

<http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html>

Oh and an additional feature I'd like -- treat packages, especially iMovie
projects, as a folder instead of a file. If I make a change to an iMovie
project the clips rarely change so recopying the entire project is a waste
of time.

Kevin

--On September 26, 2005 3:57:11 PM -0400 Chris Pepper <pepperreppep.com>
wrote:

> If you use RsyncX or PsyncX (Tiger's rsync seems broken) against an AFP
> mount, you don't need any rsync support on the server -- just AppleShare.
> Synk or Qdea's Synchronize Plus should do the trick.
>
> http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html
> http://psyncx.sourceforge.net/

I knew I should've verified the server requirement of rsync. This may be
the best option for me. I'll give these a test.

> You only get the magical partial-copy efficiency of rsync using
> client-server mode (such as ssh, rsh, or an actual 'rsyncd' server), but
> if you can do without that, there are many options, including standard
> Mac tools like Retrospect, Qdea's Synchronize, and Synk.

I really wish they would add a resume-from-end feature similar to what
Interarchy (and every other FTP program) has. I don't need (for this) the
fully magical send diffs only feature of rsync, just the ability to resume
an interrupted copy.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin:

I apologize if I'm being obvious; but what about ditto? In Tiger ditto now defaults to --rsrcFork (copies both forks) without specifying. Additionally, ditto works well with non-HFS storage volumes, although the results are annoying to non-Mac clients. Here's the page at Apple on Darwin's ditto.

Regards, Kyle

At 7:35 AM -0500 2005/09/27, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
>I really wish they would add a resume-from-end feature similar to
>what Interarchy (and every other FTP program) has. I don't need
>(for this) the fully magical send diffs only feature of rsync, just
>the ability to resume an interrupted copy.

        Is this for backups? If so, you should check out rdiff-backup.


                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

I may be missing out on some key point of complexity here, but I
believe that pretty much any of the various synchronization tools out
there can handle what you want. I've had good success with
Synchronize Pro X from Qdea. I've heard good things about Super Duper
too.

http://www.qdea.com/
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

--Nik

On Sep 27, 2005, at 6:31 AM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:

> I've been looking at synchronization programs and they may handle
> it but most seem designed around drive or directory backup, which I
> could use but I also want the quick one off move this file to there
> reliably. Single file selection is sometimes impossible, or very
> difficult in Sync programs. Drag and drop from Finder seems to fail
> a lot over slow links.

Synchronize Pro will treat packages as folders the way you want.
That's not a problem. It is expensive, but there's a less feature-
packed edition which is substantially cheaper. Still, of all the sync
programs out there, it permitted the most control over the sync process.

I'm confused why you find Finder copies (or the cp command, for that
matter) to be unreliable. I wonder if you're having this much trouble
due to other network or server issues. I regularly copy files from my
Mac to PC SMB shared, Unix servers, WebDAV disks, etc... I rarely
have any problems whatsoever. And, as far as I know, rsync and cp now
support resource forks in Tiger, which makes automated copies and
syncs fairly straightforward.

--Nik

Quoting Nik <gerberinik.net>:

> I'm confused why you find Finder copies (or the cp command, for that
> matter) to be unreliable. I wonder if you're having this much trouble
> due to other network or server issues. I regularly copy files from
> my Mac to PC SMB shared, Unix servers, WebDAV disks, etc... I rarely
> have any problems whatsoever. And, as far as I know, rsync and cp
> now support resource forks in Tiger, which makes automated copies
> and syncs fairly straightforward.

Well after writing an article touting the benefits of VPN I didn't want
to admit
that it's probably my VPN. My VPN re-keys itself every 8 hours and I'm trying
to copy a 10GB DV file over a slow VPN link. Basically the copy takes
so long I
think the re-keying kicks in and cp considers it a disconnect and aborts.

cp works fine for smaller files.

Currently I'm trying an rsync copy and I'll see how that goes.

Kevin

On Sep 27, 2005, at 4:35 PM, kevinvanhaaren.net wrote:

> Well after writing an article touting the benefits of VPN I didn't
> want
> to admit that it's probably my VPN. My VPN re-keys itself every 8
> hours and I'm trying
> to copy a 10GB DV file over a slow VPN link. Basically the copy takes
> so long I think the re-keying kicks in and cp considers it a
> disconnect and aborts.

Geez. 10 gigs over a slow link?

I might recommend ditching the VPN and just encrypting the file. Make
a two part encrypted archive out of it and put 'em on a DVD in the
mail. :)

--Nik

[Reminds me of an article I read that put forward the US Postal Service as the highest bandwidth carrier. Thanks to NetFlix, the USPS moves about 1 million DVDs per day. At 6 GB per DVD, that's about 6 petabytes/day, or 582 gigabits/second. -Andrew]

>
> Geez. 10 gigs over a slow link?
>
> I might recommend ditching the VPN and just encrypting the file. Make a
> two part encrypted archive out of it and put 'em on a DVD in the mail. :)

Actually it was a 26GB iMovie project. All but 10GB was copying fine with
the Finder. That's why I was looking for something to leave successful
files alone but copy missing files. I didn't want to have to copy the other
16GB of files in the project every time the copy failed.

The command line rsync successfully copied the file for me. I downloaded
the RsyncX app and will try it next with another large project I want to
save off. I got around the .iMovieProject files acting as a single file by
renaming them and removing the extension. That made them into standard
folders. Rsync did the trick for the missing file at that point.

The reason I'm moving these files is because I haven't figured out how to
add a Dual-Layer DVD burner to my mini yet (or if I can get a firewire one
to work with iDVD). So I'm temporarily moving the files off to a 300GB
drive in my server. The time involved doesn't bother me as I let it copy
while I'm at work.

Kevin

On 9/28/05, Nik <gerberinik.net> wrote:
> [Reminds me of an article I read that put forward the US Postal Service as the highest bandwidth carrier. Thanks to NetFlix, the USPS moves about 1 million DVDs per day. At 6 GB per DVD, that's about 6 petabytes/day, or 582 gigabits/second. -Andrew]

The old story about the woody station wagon filled with 9-tracks:
"Sure, the bandwidth is awesome, but the latency sucks."

I don't think the story was true, btw, it was just used to highlight
that bandwidth was not everything. This is why a 1.5 SDSL line is not
equivalent to a T1, even though the bandwidth is the same, the latency
will be about 10 times more on the DSL.


[We published a pair of great articles on this way back in 1997. -Adam]

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00729>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00723>


--
<http://2blog.kreme.com/>