Some time back I was asked to set up a way to archive images from a PC (running WinXP Pro). An attached high-quality scanner was used to collect images each day. I use rsync for all sorts of situations where data needs to be copied or moved about, and here then was another opportunity to use it. Two requirements:
- open-source, or at least freeware
- automated, please!
On the PC I installed DeltaCopy, a free open source package built around rsync 2.6.6. It’s easy to install, easy to setup and then you forget about it. Since we wanted to save all images in E:Scans I set up the configuration on the scanner machine very simply:
[Scans]
/cygdrive/e/Scans
I also enabled a password with the username “archive”. You can find out how to do all this in the documentation that comes with DeltaCopy, it’s very clear.
The scanner machine had a firewall enabled, so I opened port 873/TCP to allow an rsync client to connect. Then on the Linux system which was going to perform the archiving, I set up a cron job to run nightly which ran the following command:
rsync −−verbose
−−recursive
−−modify-window=2
−−password-file=/root/pass.txt
archive@scannermachine::Scans /data/archive
This pulled any new files from the E:Scans folder each night. Of course having the plain-text password visible, even if only by root, isn’t ideal so using SSH keys instead would be preferable.
In archive :: stuff :: Part II we will look at building on this basic archive scheme, and provide details on upgrading rsync used by DeltaCopy to 2.6.9 for a handy extra feature.
