Powerful graphical tools for Ubuntu Linux

Hamish Taylor
Friday, 15 August 2008 12:29

Opinion and Analysis

For my backups I use a nice little tool called "rsync". It was co-writen by Andrew Tridgell, an Australian and legend in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world, as he also co-wrote the software which has evolved into Samba.

So what does rsync do and how do you use it? Rsync is an abbreviation of Remote Synchronisation and it does exactly what you'd expect - keeps two folders or filesystems synchronised. I use it to make backups from my main data storage onto an external USB hard disk drive. It looks at the two filesystems and only copies across new and changed files.

Not too long back Microsoft released a tool named SyncToy which does much the same thing. However, having a look at it's name gives you a bit of an indication of their opinion of it!

I really don't want to be typing in the following command every time I want to make a backup: rsync -r -v --progress --stats --size-only "<source folder>" "<destination folder>", so what can I do?

I use Add/Remove Applications and use the drop-down menu to select "All available Applications", then search for Grsync, which is a front-end application for rsync. I tick the box, click Apply and then wait for the install to finish. Grsync is a tiny application so this doesn't take very long.

I then go to Applications, Internet and click on Grsync. I can't really go into all the settings but I will outline the basics.

Please read onto page 4 to find out how Grsync works.