So I recently quitted Google Drive and downloaded all my data and hoping to keep it on Hard drives myself, They are external plug in types and I want the files synced like it was on my computer. So when I plug it in it copies/syncs the things on my computer, anyone knows somethign like that?

  • Bob Smith@sopuli.xyz
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    18 hours ago

    I do something like that with rsync. The syntax is a bit tricky to figure out at first, but the idea is that you take a known-good copy of your data and run rsync to copy it to the removable drive. After the first sync, you can run the command to check for any changes and push the changes from your main data to the copy on the drive.

    You’ll want to research the command and the options, but you can theoretically run something like: rsync -avP --delete /mnt/Data_Drive/Data/ /run/media/user/Backup/Data/ where a is archive mode which helps to do things like preserve file attributes, v is verbose so you can see more details when you run the command, and P gives a progress line and keeps any partial files on the receiving end if the transfer is interrupted for some reason. --delete removes any files on the receiving end that have been deleted from your main data folder since the last time you’ve run rsync. The mnt folder path can be replaced with wherever your main data backup lives and the /run folder is a hypothetical destination folder on a removable drive.

    An additional trick is to run the command with -n at the end of it before you run it without -n at the end. -n performs a ‘dry run’ where it will output what the changes are going to be when you actually run the sync operation. This can help you spot issues like mistyping the file path in your command. If you’re only syncing one or two changes and the dry run indicates that it is going to basically re-transfer your entire data folder, then you probably got something wrong.

    Another fun thing about rsync is that if you’ve got ssh server set up on your home computers, you can run rsync to sync files from one computer to another one on your network.