Debian Administration

i would suggest that you should mount home on the new box on the old box over NFS and take a snapshot at appropriate intervals

I can recommend unison. I sync a huge part of my home directory between 4 different machines (3 Workstations, 1 notebook) several times a day, usually four times (home ws -> notebook, notebook -> office ws, office ws -> notebook, notebook -> home ws). It has been very handy for some years now. The main advantage over rsync is that it can deal with changes in a reasonable way. If you change a file on one side, it detects on which machine the file got changed last and transfers the file to the other one. If there are changes on both sides, it will not do anything until the user tells in which direction to sync.
The graphical user interface is good. The speed is not as good as rsync's though.

Did you already try csync2 ?

Best regards!
morphium

At work we use HA for main IT servers and rsync for data between master and slave nodes. Syncs are handled by rsync in a cron. DRBD is probably worth looking at but might be overkill for your needs. Wasn't aware that csync2 existed.

We used to use amanda for backups but now use RBME which is a tool that uses rsync, again in a cron to sync to a luks crypt encrypted esata hd.

This works well and after moving to non 5 year old scsi raid array to nice sas disks with lots of cores - pretty fast. See about 50MB/s on syncs which is quite nice.

sno

lsyncd.

I've used unison for this successfully in the past. It handles bidirectional sync well.

What is wrong with the automounter + nfs?

Wuala? It's an encrypted distributed storage. Google tech talk: www.wuala.com/en/learn/techtalk
Cons: it's in Java

www.wuala.com/

git does not track meta data (permissions) and will not take kindly to large files (photos, video). This may not be an issue for you and git sync mayt address that.

If you are interested in sync replication (both hosts online and connected at the same time) then also check out sshfs in addition to nfs.

This may be far off base but I got tired trying to rsync from one system to another.

Here is what I do.

It borrows from the ancient UNIX way of tarring up an entire system and restoring it.

For example, I go to the root of the source server.

Then I issue the command: tar cvpzf [name-of-archive-date-time-initials].tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/name-of-archive-date-time-initials.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys --exclude=/(others-you-deem-apply) /

Copy backup to an external drive or internal spare. Whatever you have available.

On the target server, format the drives in the same as the source.

Copy the name-of-archive-date-time-initials.tgz to the root of the target drive.

Then issue the following command: tar xvpfz name-of-archive-date-time-initials.tgz -C /

This will overlay the old over the new bare install.

Reboot when finished.

You may or may not need to once over the configuration files.

Depending on the size, speed, I/O of your hard drives on both the source and target servers if may or may not take time.

Hope this adds an option to your copying.

Google continusync, a shell script that uses rsync to do the work. It came recommended by an rsync developer.

Thanks to all for this incredible information. You've given me much to explore and think about.

All the best,

LRP

sgi fam is also an option. It can do stuffs based on changes, newfile or delete. Its very handy to just run a few lines of perl, to scp/rsync/whatever based on fileevents.

Now you all should have a look at git-annex, as it looks like it will be a real good piece of software.

Have a look at Git Annex home page