Remote Sync using PogoPlug
I am using PogoPlug as a remote backup solution. I volunteer at a charitable organization which has considerable amount of media, which required a remote backup.
I use a Drobo that is hooked up to the PogoPlug. It works great. I then put Pogoplug’s driver on the Windows 2008 file server in the headquarter. This creates network drives on the server that is mapped to my PogoPlug drives. I then use SyncToy on the file server to sync the various directories to my PogoPlug drives.
While this works reasonably well, I noticed that there are some directories that always were said to be required syncing but I failed to find what were different between the 2 ends. SyncToys has some option to determine the algorithm use to detect changes. By default, it simply checks to file size, access/update time to determine if it needs to sync the files.
I tried the option to check the file content to determine if a file needs to be updated. This proves to be too resource intensive as it needs to read the entire remote file to determine a checksum for comparison purpose. With my setup, this takes way too long to complete (I have close to 2TB worth of data, many of them are video files).
I am trying out Unison (from UPENN) and Rsync. Rsync is interesting in that a local server on the PogoPlug is required (and it exists in the OpenPogo site). While I haven’t try it out yet, it seems to me such a solution might be a good one for such kind of remote syncing.
The client side can calculate the local checksum while the remote server side can calculate the checksum locally as well. Then it would be simple to compare and they don’t even have to be synchronized.
I will report back with my findings…
A blog is good thing to have…
While you may feel that you are too busy to start a blog, try it out anyway… who cares if your stuff is quality or not. The important thing is to try out new things and learn…
Do I really need a blg?
It seems that every Tom, Dick or Harry is doing a blog these days. I am not a Tom, Dick or Harry, so why do I need one?
Following the crowd? I guess it can be fun.
Just publishing my random ideas and stuff that interests me. Hope I find something that people may find it useful…
