rsync dir in _both_ directions?

[Martin Pool]

On  4 Feb 2002, Jack McKinney <jackmc-rsync at lorentz.com> wrote:

>     Well, I read my email on my laptop, and it is sometimes necessary to
> login to a central server to read my email (firewall issues).  What I do is
> to peridocally sync with the central server (which we'll call "server") by:
> 
> rsync -e ssh -rptlv Mail server:.
> rsync -e ssh -rptlv server:Mail .

I think the problem is not so much that it takes two commands, but
rather that there is domain-specific merge knowledge that rsync does
not have.

With your commands, all messages will end up on both machines, which
is fine to start with.  But if you delete a message it will presumably
keep on being copied back from the other machine.  I don't know a good
way for rsync to distinguish between the case of a message deleted on
machine A, and a message newly added on machine B.

If you use --update, and only flag files rather than deleting them
then I guess you would be OK.

-- 
Martin