Powerful graphical tools for Ubuntu Linux

Hamish Taylor
Friday, 15 August 2008 11:29

Opinion and Analysis

You set the Source and Destination folders using the browse buttons. Clicking on the blue button will swap the Source and Destination folders. This is quite useful if you want to do two-way synchronisation. First you sync one-way, click on the blue button and then sync again.

"Delete on destination" will delete, on the destination folder, any files and folders that have been deleted from the source folder.

"Size only" will look only at the size of the file and ignore the time-stamp of the file.

Under "Advanced options" there are two useful checkboxes. "Always checksum" runs a check of the actual file contents and will copy only if they are different. However, this process is extremely processor and time intensive, so should be used carefully. 

"Compress data" is quite useful if you are doing this over a wireless connection or over the internet, although then you should only do that when using an encrypted connection, which is outside the scope of this article.

Once you are happy with your choices of options, click on Simulation, which will give you a report of what it might do. This is good for checking that you have everything in the right place and the right way around! When you want it to actually run, click on Execute.

Depending on how big the data sets are this might take a while. As an indication I have 500-600GB of data on my system, of which I change maybe 2 GB a week. The whole process takes about 10-15 minutes to backup onto my external USB drive. If there is no data changes, the whole process takes less than 2 minutes (although I recently worked out how to script this which makes it even easier), so it is very efficient.

So that's it for another article. I hope that I have highlighted that Linux has some very powerful tools which have graphical user interfaces. This is just two of them. In my next article, I will try to explore some of the other tools.

Thanks as always for reading to the end, and as always feel free to leave feedback and comments. I do appreciate them all.