rsync?

rsync?

Posted Nov 22, 2005 6:22 UTC (Tue) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959)
In reply to: rsync? by warthawg
Parent article: CLI Magic: Simple backup is Mirdir (Linux.com)

First, I've always enjoyed Joe Barr's columns, and I particularly liked his you-can-almost-hear-him-sighing-in-despair repost in the comments section of the article over on linux.com.

Having said that, this is for Joe. And I'm speaking for myself :-)

I've used Linux since about 95 (my first distro was Yggdrasil!), and I'll let the rest of it go unsaid (not that there's too much). I've now come to the point that, for every task I have, I look for one tool that is as much of a superset of everything else as possible, simply because -- lemme say it outright -- I'm too old to remember all of them :-( I don't always find the "one ring", but I look for it anyway!

Which is why I agree with the idea that when talking about a new tool, a reference can be made to similar tools with a short bit of info, just to give us "crusty old geeks" a very brief comparision. Please dont read it as a "my ditro can beat up your distro" situation. I'm too old for that kind of stuff too :-)

In this example, something like "For power users, rsync [URL of your previous article here] offers more choices, at the price of more complexity. For example, leave off the final slash on the source dir and see how long you take to figure out what went wrong!" would have been appropriate.

I'd hate to offend Joe -- I've learnt a lot from him. But I still wish I hadn't spent time downloading and looking at mirdir, and something like the example para above would have helped me avoid that.

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