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
