Best way to mirror two folders when one is portable?

[oshunluvr]

I travel for work and have a "healthy" amount of files (2TB+) that I need. When on the road, I work on a laptop so I have a 4TB portable drive that I keep all this stuff on. When in my office, I use my server to hold the files and can access them from either the laptop or my office desktop.

I need to sync these two folders so when I'm gone I can work from the portable drive and match up to the server, and reverse that just prior to travel. To be clear, I want full sync - as in deleted from one deletes from the other and new files overwrite older files. I can manage it one-way at a time easily enough so I don't need two-way sync (unless it's easier) I just need to be able to sync either direction.

Unfortunately, I can't use btrfs as this drive is used on multiple systems including a Windows system from time-to-time.

I've looked at rsync, unison, and some other ideas but I've no experience with any options I've found so far and I'm open to suggestions. The machines doing the syncing will both be Linux (ubuntu server and KDEneon or Kubuntu).

Suggestions?

[sithlord48]

rsync will work well for you needs. something like

rsync -aP --delete --backup --backup-dir=/dir to backup deleted files <SRC> <DEST>

i think would be what you are looking for, try a dry run (-n --dry-run) to see exactly what will happen.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, I kinda figured that's where I would end up. I have rethought it a bit and I think I'll just work off of the portable drive all the time and back it up to the server using rsync. It's a bit slower than my server access but not enough to be an issue. That will keep me more on track - always knowing the portable drive is the most current.

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll try it out later today.

[phantom011]

Try Luckybackup