syncing two pcs

[Donald Allen]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 12:19 PM, David Brown <gnucash at davidb.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 10:08:36AM -0400, Donald Allen wrote:
>
>> In my situation, there's no USB drive, except for backup. When I'm
>> switch from computer A to computer B, I rsync from A to B.
>
> This is the main advantage of unison over rsync, it remembers which
> direction you need to sync in.  If you do end up editing both, it
> presents you with a choice as to which one you want to use.  I've done
> this occasionally, and usually, I can just pick the correct one, and
> re-enter a few transactions.  Sometimes, I'm even lucky enough for
> them to be independent, and I can just replay the extra log file.

I'm aware of this property of unison, but I have no incentive to
switch from rsync, which is all set up (I have some shell scripts I
wrote to make use of it simpler). For me, the thing that very
occasionally gets forgotten is sync-ing *at all* when going from one
machine to another. Having remembered to do that, I never have trouble
remembering which direction to sync; it's sort of right in front of
your nose. And I have no interest in writing to the gnucash files or
any other files on more than one machine at a time.

>
> I did end up writing a small script to put the gnucash data file into
> git instead of all of the backup files.  I store them uncompressed,
> and with git's delta compression, so far storing 256 copyies of my
> data file (which is about 4.5MB now) takes less space than 2
> compressed copies of the data.
>
> Also, keeping the gnucash data file uncompressed makes programs like
> rsync and unison _much_ faster.  Once it's compressed, the data is
> pretty much completely different, whereas left uncompressed, rsync's
> algorithm can figure out deltas to transfer.

Usual space-time trade-off. In my case, I don't find the rsync times a
problem at all, so again, no incentive not to compress the files.

>
> David
>