Re: /home replication on laptop

[Christian Rehn <rehn@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

Jack McKinney writes:
 > Big Brother tells me that Christian Rehn wrote:
 > > Joseph Schlecht writes:
 > > 
 > > I use catchup (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/oss/catchup/) to
 > > synchronize my home on the laptop with my home on the PC at work.
 > > This allows me to modify files on both homes and later synchronize
 > > them.  Instead of just deleting the old version of a file catchup may
 > > also save the old file in a special directory.  If the same file is
 > > modified on both computers catchup does not overwrite the
 > > modifications but renames one by adding the extension .alt so you can
 > > solve the conflict manually.
 > > 
 > > You may also use rsync or rdist but this allows you only to propagate
 > > modifications from one PC to another without the advantages of
 > > catchup.
 > 
 >      Actually, rsync does have options to save files instead of deleting
 > them by backing them up to special directory or by adding an extension
 > to them.

That's right, you can avoid the deletion of files but rsync does only
work in one direction.  Assume you modify file x on host A and file y
on host B.  If you rsync from A to B you would only get x on host B
and nothing on A, if you rsync from B to A you get y on host A but not
x on B. 

Catchup compares md5 checksums and modification times and if you
"catchup A and B" you wold get a copy of x on host B and a copy of y
on host A.  This is the advantage of catchup I mentioned.

Cheers,
Christian