ftp mirroring/syncing

Hi, I am setting up a machine to mirror my hosting for backup and also extra development oppotunities.

I have my main site out there and I want to keep the local in sync with that.

Local is redhat 9, remote is also unix based.

Any experience with this anyone?

I have looked at mirroring software and also rsync. rsync seems like the way to go but involves installing it onto my hosting, I probably can do that but I don;t really want too.

Any advice or help?

thanks

Don't know if this'll help, but WS_FTP has a utility (ftpsync.exe) that allows you to sync from local --> remote, local <--> remote, or remote --> local.

You can do it php and cron. One PHP script could be fired by a cron tab the have cron fire another script to ftp the files up to the other server. Then on the other server after enough time has passed have cron untar the files. Kinda a little painful way to do it but FREE

I think wget can do what I need it to do.

thanks


the right program was right under my nose!

The easiest way on UNIX is to yse a program called rsync. It connects and negotiates a transaction that will updated only the mirrored files.

FTPing will always copy all the data. This is bad if all you changed was one file. Rsync uses a binary difference algorithm to send only the changes.

It can also be secured via an SSH tunnel.

Granted this is a PHP forum, but using two independent scripts could cause problems, if, for example, one script didn't finish in time for the other to start correctly.

We set up an rsync box at work for backing up our production server to an identical backup box. On average, it only transmits about 10 megs of data, and its backing up the whole box.

GOOD TIP! Filefrog