Mac Geekery

I’m looking for a way to do updates, and occasional total syncs between a local folders here on my Mac and folders on a remote server, which I access over VPN through a mounted smb share. I don’t want to mirror all the files locally (there are huge .swfs in some directories) in most cases, but do want to be able to merge (I’ll worry about setting that up with unison later…) and update files at will. So sometimes I’ll want to do a perfect sync, deleting obsolete remote files, but most of the time I’ll want to just add and update from local folders, merging occasionally (when management alerts me at the last moment that they’ve been tinkering with something on the server…).

I’ve tried rsync (both command line and gui) and unison, and have only limited success… rsync seems to choke and do odd things to permissions and modification dates, while I can’t get unison to function at all. Using the rsync gui, I was able to move files, but I wasn’t getting any feedback (Verbosity was on) and, as mentioned, often choked. Plus, the script helper didn’t seem to function at all, and I wasn’t sure if running things through cron was the way to go anymore (10.4.7).

Here’s what I tried with rsync on the command line (I can’t ssh into the remote server):

rsync -vzrun –exclude ’.DSStore’ ~/Sites/HMSandbox/videoconcepts/ /Volumes/docs/accounting/video_concepts/

where the remote sever is smb://coldevs/docs

It started to work, and it looks like it began to update some files, but they now all have a modification date of Dec 1969. Plus weird permissions.

With Unison, I tried much the same: unison ~/Sites/HMSandbox/videoconcepts/ /Volumes/docs/accounting/videoconcepts -force /Users/jamesfishwick/Sites/HMSandbox/video_concepts/

I think perhaps I need to do something with the socket command? I know under windows, it is possible to synchronize with a remote directory using the file: protocol over the Windows Network Neighborhood. For example,

unison foo //host/drive/bar