Moving data between 2 PCs

[Dotan Cohen]

On 10/10/06, marcus <lists at wordit.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 October 2006 16:15, Billy Pollifrone wrote:
> > On 10/10/06, Orjan Sinclair <o.sinclair at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there really no reasonably simple way to copy from 1 PC to
> > another via removable media?? And keep ownership and rwx
>
> There's a simple way, especially good for USB sticks. I use "Unison".
>
> - Install unison and the GTK frontend unison-gtk, via synaptic or:
>
> apt-get update
> apt-get install unison unison-gtk
>
> - Mount the USB drive(s) and run unison-gtk. Note: If the USB drives are
> formatted with FAT, as I suspect they are, then run "sudo unison-gtk"
> (see note below).
>
> Unison will ask you to select source and destination, then show a report
> of the files which have changed. It's a very simple and fast way to
> keep backups on a USB stick, or sync files on various drives.
>
>
> CAUTION: This goes for any sync program (you may know from Syncback on
> Windows). If you edit on both drives, meaning source and destination
> may change, then check in which direction you are copying, especially
> if a file has been deleted on the source side. I would first play
> around with test files before using your important data.
>
> Note: Since FAT does not support all the permissions of a Linux file
> system, run unison as root. This is the only method I found to work
> properly with FAT formatted drives. Mounting with various permissions
> causes weird issues simply because FAT is different to EXT2/3.
> When using FAT and EXT2/3 drives, you may need to experiment because of
> the different file systems and permissions. Do some test runs first.

If he tars up the files, then he won't need to worry about FAT losing
the permissions information. He can even compress the tarball.

Dotan Cohen

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