Title says it - I’m not sure whether to rclone serve, or just use it as a client to drive replication. There’s a lot of rclone serve protocols to choose from.
I’m a new user. I have two FreeBSD systems and a couple of Windows desktops. Currently I periodically copy to my primary NAS over SMBD, and every morning the main NAS runs a copy-to-offsite script using rsync that copies ‘everything’ to a host in my garage, across my yard, using WIFI.
It works, but rsync is slow and the Windows PCs don’t back up very well.
I did experiment with ZFS direct incremental but decided that was a bit flaky over my network, and tied me to ZFS more than I liked. I’ve never lost data with ZFS on FreeBSD, but it seemed a step too far.
What’s the best way to serve the target ZFS volumes on FreeBSD for imaging from both source systems? rclone serve - using which transport? Or expose NFS/SMBD from the OS and target from rclone?
Most of the files do not change at all day on day, something that caches effectively and can say ‘no changes in this directory or below’ would be wonderful, but just having more parallelism than I get at the moment would be good. The wifi isn’t all that fast and the storage devices are al on USB so actual data transfer is bound to be slow-ish (if fast compared to cloud) - I think most of the issue is latency so I’m wary of chatty LAN-focussed protocols.
Total volume is about 4TB currently. Some of the files (flac files) I would like to sync to an RPi that sits in my hifi, and which runs Linux, but that’s a secondary target.
Is SFTP likely to be better for root initiated transfers over files with different ownerships? I’ll read the guide, thank you, it will at least be good for desktop to NAS.
You can create a backup profile that will log on to the other server as root or whatever account you wish. Then you run a mirror backup from the source to the destination and you won't have to worry about how to transfer files from one computer to another computer with a separate user ID.
You can as was suggested also create an rclone config for logging in as root or any other ID and then run the sync command.
The nice thing about freefilesync is it supports real-time synchronization meaning that it runs in the background and automatically backs up new files and change files.
It says ‘Open source file synchronisation’ - is there a repo or just the source zip download?
GPL3 with commercial use restriction is a new one to me.
As far as I can see there is no build support for the Windows version, just a linux-oriented Makefile that assumes pkg-config (and wx, gtk+ etc). I’m not sure that’s really OK for GPL3 and a Windows installer package, but no matter.
There is a Linux installer on their download page. It is in a compressed file format and when you unzip it or untar it there is a file that you execute and it does the installation. You don't need to muddle with the source code
I do however care about the Windows version, and my NAS and Backup servers run FreeBSD.
I’m a C++ coder in my day job. The ‘free software’ nature of this is weird - am I absolutely sure that the Windows installer reflects the source zip? Is anyone?
I think you’re overthinking it. The Windows version is a regular Windows installer. The Linux OS doesn’t matter, so long as it’s running an SSH server. Never used FreeBSD but yes to Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, and Windows. FFS works with all of it. It even backs up my phone. I run Termux linux and sshd.