Databases, Systems & Networks

Backup your Mac with rsync

Using rsync: We all know we need to make backups. Apparently, 30% of all computer users lose all of their files sometime in their life. Not a pretty foresight.

Fortunately, Mac Leopard users have a program called Time Machine that makes things a lot easier. But is Time Machine the perfect backup solution? I don’t think so. There are a couple of things that make Time Machine very unsuitable for me:

• You need to get a seperate external hard drive that can only be used for Time Machine (and has to be formatted first)
• That drive has to be formatted in HFS+, hence, without any (commercial) third-party plugins it’s not readable on Windows or Linux systems
• You have to leave your drive on all the time to make sure Time Machine makes backups
• You can’t make a list of things you want to have backed up, you can only exclude folders from your complete hard disk
• Time Machine makes an exact copy of your hard drive

Especially that last ‘feature’ is very irritating to me. I have an external drive with about 300G of files, including lots of music and video files. My MacBook drive is only 80GB big, so i can never have the complete contents of my external drive on my MacBook. Let’s say i have 10GB of MP3 files, which i backup with Time Machine, then i remove about 5GB of files from my MacBook to free some space. What happens when the next backup round is happening? Exactly, the 5GB of files get deleted from the external disk as well. When i want to play a certain MP3 file from my external drive i now have to ‘restore’ and ‘look back in history’ to find it. Not very user-friendly.

Luckily, there is a very good (free) alternative to Time Machine that does exactly what i want with backups: it lets you specify which folders you want to backup, it doesn’t delete things on the backup drive when you delete files from your original drive, and it’s compatible with any external drive and can even backup files over a network. This piece of software is called rsync. Here’s how to use it.

rsync is a command-line utility shipped with every copy of Mac OS X. It originated from the UNIX/Linux world, where it has been part of most Linux distributions for many years. rsync is reliable, fast, and easily configurable. Try running it by opening up the Terminal.app (located in your Applications/Utilities folder) and running the command:

rsync

You’ll get an overview of all possible options. In essence the syntax is very simple:

rsync OPTIONS SOURCE DESTINATION

What you’ll probably want is a one-way transfer of all files in SOURCE to DESTINATION, where only files are copied that are not available on the DESTINATION disk or different. Aside from that you’ll want to include all subdirectories, links, permissions, date/time, groups, owner and devices. To do that simply use this easy-to-remember option list:

rsync -rlptgoD

Ha, just kidding! Fortunately there is another switch that does all of that with one switch, namely the archive switch:

rsync -a

So, let’s say you want to backup the files in your Documents directory to your external harddrive, which you appropriately named ‘backup’, then this would be the command:

rsync -a ~/Documents/ /Volumes/backup/Documents

For those of you who don’t use the Terminal very often: the tilde (~) is a shortcut for your home directory. If, for example, your name would be ‘Alice’ your home directory would probably be

/Users/alice

Lire la suite…

What is rsync?

Rsync is a program for synchronizing two directory trees across different file systems even if they are on different computers. It can run its host to host communications over ssh to keep things secure and to provide key based authentication. If a file is already present in the target and is the same as on the source the file will not be transmitted. If the file on the target is different than the one on the source then only the parts of it that are different are transferred. These features greatly increase the performance of rsync over a network.

Lire la suite…

Suppose you as a software developer has set up daily builds of your software for testing purposes. Every day you make a new build, users have to re-download the updated build to evaluate it. In this case you may want to enable differential downloads, so that users can download only difference between two builds, thereby saving on the server’s bandwidth. Users will also be happy as they don’t have to wait to re-download the whole thing. Similar situations are encountered when you want to set up a download archive which allows incremental sync for users.

In these cases, how would you distribute incrementally updated files efficiently for multiple users? In fact, there are open-source storage solutions that come with « delta sync » capability built-in, such as ownCloud or Syncthing. These kinds of full-blown solutions with built-in GUI require users to install a dedicated client, and thus may be an overkill for simple file distribution that you are looking for.

Barring full-blown third-party software like these, perhaps rsync may come to mind, which can do bandwidth-efficient file sync. The problem with rsync, however, is that all the heavy duty computations is done at the server side. That is, when a client requests for a file sync, the server needs to perform block-by-block checksum computation and search for blocks not available on the client. Obviously this procedure can place a significant strain on the server’s resources if the server needs to handle many users, and thus is not scalable.

What is Zsync?

This is when a command-line tool called zsync comes in handy. While zsync uses the same delta-encoding based sync algorithm as rsync does, it moves the heavy duty computation away from the server and onto the clients. What do I mean by that?

Well, in zsync, the server maintains a separate .zsync metadata file for a file to distribute, which contains a list of « precomputed » checksums for individual blocks of the file. When zsync client requests for a file sync, the client downloads .zsync metadata file first, and performs block-by-block checksum calculation to find missing blocks on its own. The client then requests for missing blocks using HTTP range requests. As you can see, the server is totally out of the loop from the sync algorithm, and simply serves requested file blocks over HTTP, which makes it ideal when incremental file sync is needed for many users.

Here is a quick rundown on the server-side overhead difference between rsync and zsync. In the plot below, I compare rsync and zsync in terms of the server’s CPU usage when 200 users are downloading a tarball file with 2.5% discrepancy of a previous version. For fair comparison, SSH is not used for rsync.

With zsync, since all checksum computation overhead has shifted from the server to individual clients, the server overhead is reduced dramatically. A small neat idea makes zsync a real winner!

In the rest of the tutorial, I will show how to distribute a file incrementally using zsync under the Linux environment.

Zsync: Client Side Setup

On the client side, you need to install zsync to initiate file transfer from a remote web server. zsync is extremely lightweight, and is included in the most Linux distros. Here is how to install zsync on various distros.

Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt-get install zsync

Fedora:

$ sudo yum install zsync

CentOS or RHEL:

First, enable Repoforge repository, and then run:

$ sudo yum install zsync

Arch Linux:

$ sudo pacman -S zsync

Lire la suite…

When a group of employees collaborate on a project, there is need for handling all aspects and complexities of the project from start to finish, such as task assignment, scheduling, budget management, communication, documentation, and so on. Thus a good project management tool is a necessity for any kinds of businesses or organizations which are involved in a lot of collaborative projects.

Especially web-based online project management tools are the top choice for such environments as different project members can access and share the online tools wherever they are. If your organization requires good web-based project management software, you will find ONLYOFFICE a viable candidate.

ONLYOFFICE is a free and open source office suite that enables seamless project collaboration in the web-based environment. It offers different management tools for documents, emails, events, tasks and client relations. Using ONLYOFFICE, a project manager can schedule the workflow, lead discussions, monitor and coordinate the project progress using Gantt Chart and reports.

In this tutorial, I will describe the main project management features offered by ONLYOFFICE and give some tips to use them more efficiently.

Installing ONLYOFFICE using Docker on Linux

The easiest way to install ONLYOFFICE is by using Docker. The tutorial presented here covers the Docker-based installation instructions for the whole ONLYOFFICE system with online editors integrated for real-time document collaboration.

If you want to install ONLYOFFICE without editors (called « community server »), simply execute the following command:

The above command will download the official ONLYOFFICE Docker image with all dependencies needed for its correct work. For more installation and configuration tips, please refer to the ONLYOFFICE official documentation.

Running a Self-Hosted Web Office

To open your web office, enter in the address bar of your browser localhost (http://IP-Address/) on which the docker is running. The Welcome page will open:

Enter a password and specify the email address you will use to access your office the next time.

Getting Started with a New Project

First, click the Projects link to open the project management tool. To start a new project, click on the Create New…button in the upper left corner and select the Project option from the drop-down list. Fill out the form: specify your project Title and enter a short Description. If necessary, assign a Project Manager and create a project Team.

To restrict access to the newly created project, check the Save this project as private box. Review the project settings and click on the Save button.

Note: to create a new portal, the full privilege administrator or projects management administrator rights are required.

Setting up Your Project Hierarchy

Once the project is started, the next step is to create the project hierarchy which involves the following:

• Set up project key points with milestones
• Distribute the whole amount of work among the team members using tasks
• Link tasks to determine the order in which they need to be performed
• Divide a task into subtasks if it requires several persons to perform several steps

Organize Project Documentation

Keep all the documentation related to your project in one place to access it anytime anywhere. Switch to theDocuments tab on your project page to:

• Upload documents from your hard disk drive
• Download an existing document to your hard disk drive
• Filter and sort documents to facilitate the search
• Copy or move documents to another folder
• Create a new document, spreadsheet or presentation, open and edit the existing ones if the online editorsare installed
• Attach documents to the related tasks

Managing Access Rights

Being a project manager you can manage the project team, tasks, milestones, discussions, comments inside your project; change project status, edit its settings, and also set access rights to project team members for a private project.

By default, each member of your project team can add tasks, assign them to himself or other team members and manage them; start new discussions; add and remove documents; view all content inside your project: milestones, tasks, documents, discussions and contacts.

To restrict the access to an item, switch to the Team tab on your project page, select the team member you wish to set access rights for, and click on one of the links to the right: Discussions, Documents, All Tasks, Milestones,Contacts.

Note: you can set the access rights for each team member unless he/she does not have full privilege administrator or projects management administrator rights.

Monitoring Project using Gantt Chart

Making changes to your project once it is underway is both indispensable and inevitable part of its life cycle. The simplest way to do it with ONLYOFFICE, especially when you manage multiple related projects, is to use Gantt Chart, a bar chart used to illustrate a project schedule.

To open Gantt Chart, click on the Gantt Chart link on the left side panel, or click on the Gantt Chart button in the upper right corner of your project page.

Gantt Chart gives you a panoramic view of all your project activities and allows you to:

• Select one or several projects you wish to coordinate
• View and change the project activity status: open/closed, active/overdue
• Manage the project milestones and tasks: create, edit, close, reopen, delete, etc.
• Link the tasks within your project to show the task dependencies

Useful Tips

1. Leading discussions

To find a solution of problems occurred, you can start a project-related discussion and discuss the issue with your project team within the Discussion tab.

2. Using templates

To easily start a new project, you can use the previously created templates (click on the Create New… button and select the Project Template option to create one).

3. Reporting

To keep up with what each team member is doing, make use of the Reports system. Click on the corresponding link on the left-side panel and generate a report or set up needed parameters once and regularly receive automatic reports by email on certain date and time.

When disaster strikes (and it will), you can put the pieces back together if you’ve got a solid backup solution in place.