The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: IT

Synchronising two external hard drives with rsync on a mac

This is more of a reminder for myself so I don’t need to keep googling or looking at man when I need to look up the syntax.

Let’s assume you have two hard drives, ones called PHOTOS the other other BACKUP. You can use the following command to synchronise photos (including removing all files that were deleted on PHOTOS to BACKUP.) also ignoring backup files (.* files).

rsync -av --delete --exclude=".*" /Volumes/PHOTOS/ /Volumes/BACKUP

It’s nice to test this on a smaller folder first if you like. You should note the slash and lack of slash matters. To do a dry run try:

rsync -avn --delete --exclude=".*" /Volumes/PHOTOS/ /Volumes/BACKUP

or alternatively:

rsync -av --dry-run --delete --exclude=".*" /Volumes/PHOTOS/ /Volumes/BACKUP

Happy backups!

Crashplan on Mac OSX not compatible with Java 1.7

Last year, I decided to backup my data in the cloud. I liked the idea of Crashplan because it encrypts stuff before shipping it off to the cloud. It runs in the background, and as long as you have a reasonable upload speed, backing up things like SLR photos aren’t so painful.

Unfortunately I rebooted my machine today, and found that my backup service was no longer working. I scoured their twitter stream, their website to see status, but it all looked good. I figured something must have changed on my machine. I forgot that I had installed JDK7 earlier in the week on my machine, but didn’t really link the two events because I barely need to restart the mac.

Fortunately this post told me how to reconfigure crashplan to run on Java 1.6 again. Thanks interwebs.

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