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i would like to sync some directory of an internal hard drive to external hard drive. When i write / modify a file of my internal hard drive, automatically the same file is copied to the external hard drive... and bye bye backup ;)

Something like a RAID with external hard drive..

Is it possible ?

Thank you

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I'm afraid that thinking "bye bye backup" is almost never appropriate, or correct. –  Ben Pilbrow Jun 6 '10 at 10:57
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5 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

In real time as far as i know there's only DRDB http://www.drbd.org/
But I don't think it applies at your situation, since when you delete a file you'll delete it also on the external disk. More easily you can use rsync and a cron script that run every few minutes.

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Thank you for your answer. But if "cron" rsync to run every ..5 minutes, does it compromise performance ? Isn't it too heavy (it check every files if something is changed ?) ? –  stighy Jun 6 '10 at 11:16
That's why they invented file system with snapshots capabilities ;) –  Pier Jun 6 '10 at 11:31
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lsyncd seems to be the perfect solution. it combines inotify (kernel builtin function witch watches for file changes in a directory trees) and rsync (cross platform file-syncing-tool).

lsyncd -rsyncssh /home remotehost.org backup-home/

Quote from github:


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You can maybe check chironfs http://www.furquim.org/chironfs/

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incron (as suggested to me on this site earlier this year).

It's still no substitute for a proper backup procedure though.

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probably better would be to engrave it into stone. –  Dee May 23 '13 at 19:58
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You can just create a Software RAID1 over your internal and external hard drives. For the system it doesn't make a difference if it's a built-in hard drive or an externally attached mass storage.

But RAID is no backup! What happens if you accidentally delete a file on your hard drive? It also gets deleted on your external "backup" drive.

Backups usually comprise more than one generation of files so you can retrieve accidentally deleted files from it.

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A big +1 for the explicit "RAID is not backup". –  nickgrim Jun 21 '12 at 11:29
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