auto-backup across the net

[Colin Kuskie]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 09:58:19AM -0700, Kari Chisholm wrote:
> 
> That's right: I'm building it in Perl myself.  The database size is
> actually quite small, but it's still mission-critical.  
> 
> Basically, it's a large stack of tiny little flatfiles.  If I could
> write a script (called by cron) to look for all files that have
> changed, and then deliver them to someplace across the net - well,
> that'd be perfect.

I love Perl, but what you're trying to do has already been done with
another tool called rsync.

http://rsync.samba.org/

It does exactly what you want.  It opens a connection between source
and destination, checks to see which files have changed and by default
only sends the differences.  It's been optimized to be very fast
and efficient.  In fact, it's only problem is that last time I
checked you couldn't embed it in perl :)  When I worked at Cadence
Software, we used it to mirror multi-Gb design databases nightly
between England, Scotland, and both coasts of the U.S.

Colin

Colin
TIMTOWTDI