Synchronizing Two Drives?

[flyingpoint]

I've looked in the tutorials and a few of the old posts without finding the answer (which I'm sure is there somewhere..) -- I'm hoping someone can help with what I think is a simple problem.

 

My daughter and I are ripping a fairly large CD collection (700+) I rip on the downstairs computer, she's upstairs. How do I keep the two drives in synch using Retrospect? I obviously don't want the files compressed, so it's a duplicate job or jobs.

 

Thanks.

 

Steve

[RonaldL]

The easiest way woulud be to install Retrospect onto the downstairs computer and install the Retrospect client onto the upstairs computer. Then you can set up a duplicate script with the source being the drive that has the music on the downstairs computer. The destination should be the drive on the upstairs machine. I would actually recommend duplicating to a subvolume on that drive instead of to the entire drive because that would overwrite/delete data (if you wanted to use this drive for other things besides music files).

[flyingpoint]

Thanks. But wouldn't this only move the unique downstair's content to the second machine? The upstairs computer also has files that I'd like to move downstairs.

[RonaldL]

Sorry, I misunderstood your setup. If there are music files on both machines and you want to get them onto both machines, the best way to do this would be to set up two duplicate scripts. Set one script to duplicate from the drive on the upstairs computer and to the drive on the downstairs computer. Create a second script which duplicates from the drive on the downstairs computer to the drive on the upstairs computer.

 

The key thing for this is that when you are picking the destination, change it from Replace Entire Volume to Replace Corresponding Files. This way, if there are any files that are on one machine but not the other, they will be duplicated over. The only thing you should keep in mind is that if you want to delete a file, you will need to delete it from both computers because if you only do one, the next time the duplicate scripts run, it will reduplicate the file.