Steroids for Rsync!

[Eli]

Scott wrote:
> of directories. The replacement for dnotify is being worked on in the 
> kenel and it's called inotify. If I understand it correctly 
> and they get it finished, it would be an awesome addition to rsync.

I can't speak for the people who work on rsync, but from the sounds of this,
it seems like it's better suited for a new *rsync capable* daemon that
listens for the inotify messages and synchronizes files to an rsync server
using the rsync protocol.  This could be achieved using the librsync modules
(I think?  I haven't checked to see if those are kept up to date with
current rsync protocols) and would avoid having to create a listening daemon
mode for rsync on top of what it already has.  At least, I hope that's the
method you were getting at - you wouldn't want to spawn a new call to rsync
every time a file was modified - that would most likely murder your system!

This sounds like an awesome idea though - I for one would jump on this if it
was good in performance.  I had previously experiemented with something
called ssyncd which was OK, but had to scan all the files it was to monitor
constantly.  It's one problem was that should the part doing the monitoring
lose access to the folder it was copying from, it would think the files were
all gone and start an "rm -rf *" essentially and wipe all your sync'd data
(that was fun times, fun times).  I had poked a few other alternatives, but
none were good enough.  If this inotify stuff actually works, it will be a
godsend :)

That’s my take on this :)

Eli.