My photo-taking workflow while on vacation usually involves taking a lot of photos daily, dumping them to a laptop, processing, then backing them up once I have returned home.
Previously, I accomplished this manually using BeyondCompare for Windows, as that would run on Windows Home Server.
Since moving to ZFS-based storage, however, this is no longer an option as BeyondCompare only has a Linux client (nothing for Unix/BSD).
There are other ways to get around this:
- SSHFS and Meld – Complicated, somewhat bloated, but great BeyondCompare alternative
- *Commander Utilities – Midnight Commander derivatives can accomplish similar tasks using the ctrl+x,d shortcut
- Rsync – typically installed by default, easy to script
I chose Rsync as I wanted something more automated, but I do find myself using Midnight Commander from time-to-time to simply “get things done” when syncing files other than my images.
Here’s how I did it:
rsync -a -e ssh /volumes/PICTURES/ 'username@mymac:/Volumes/BIGRAID/'
Let’s break this down into smaller pieces:
rsync – this is the command that will do our heavy lifting and file comparison
-a – archive mode
-e – specify an RSH replacement
ssh  – use SSH
/volumes/PICTURES/Â – this specifies the “Volumes” folder on my Mac, and the “PICTURES” drive within it. Replace this with the location of your items to backup
‘Â – note the use of single quotes here. We’re using these in case there are spaces in the folder names, and we could have done the same above.
username@mymac - We’re logging on to the host “mymac” with the username “username”. You’ll probably want to change these. I use a hostname here, but you could just as easily use an IP address if you use static IP addresses.
:/volumes/BIGRAID/Â – the colon denotes a subfolder on the server we are backing up to, and /volumes/BIGRAID in this case refers to a ZFS pool called “BIGRAID”.
Do you have a similar backup strategy for BSD/Unix targets that you would like to share?