[Wylug-discuss] Delurk and how not to use rsyncApa

[John Hodrien]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2011, james riley wrote:

> Both machines have an encrypted /home partition. I made the mistake of
> trying to copy /home rather /home/james. Fortunately, most of my
> documents are up to date on the non-broken box, except the netbook
> doesn't have space for the many videos on the desktop. Though this
> does mean that I can finally run gparted on the desktop to make /home
> bigger without worrying about losing the data on it. Because the data
> are already gone.

A tip for whenever you're doing stuff like this however familiar you are with
it and however confident you are you've not made a mistake:

--dry-run

Let it show you what it's thinking of doing before actually doing it.

I've never been entirely happy with any of the tools I've used for
cross-platform two-way (if not n-way) file syncing (for one way rsync is
great).  Unison has just proved far too slow for syncing disk -> usb so that
got the boot (but was otherwise rather good).  SyncToy under windows is
wonderfully fast, but not cross platform, and I've managed to find situations
where it seems to decide the fastest way to sync is to not really bother doing
it properly.

What does anybody else use?

jh