Can rsync synchronize design changes to tables and data betwe en two Microsoft ACCESS replicas, mdb files?

[David Bolen]

R. Weisz [rweisz4 at home.com] writes:

> Has anyone using rsync ever tried using it to manage the replication and
> synchronization process for Microsoft ACCESS replicas?  If so,

Not for Microsoft ACCESS, but we synchronize copies of SQL/Anywhere
databases constantly.

As long as you're not trying to synchronize files that are actively in
use (which may prevent rsync from reading portions of the files) there's
no reason why it won't work for any database file.  Rsync itself is just
treating the files as arbitrary binary data - it doesn't care about any
structure to the file data, whether it be a database storage, word
processing document, or just flat text.

One small suggestion for efficiency - for our database transfers, we
keep the blocksize at some multiple of the underlying database page
size (1K for our SQL/Anywhere databases) since its the nature of the
beast that all changes to the database will occur within those
boundaries.  It's not guaranteed to be more efficient, but we've found
it to be so (it prevents multiple rsync blocks from being involved in
a single database change).  I believe for the Jet engine that access
uses it was 2K prior to Jet 4.0 and 4K afterwards.

-- David

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