© Copyright Robert Vasvari, 1993-2009.

Main Uses:

Example use for an FTP file backup:

Let's say we have a folder with our VID (very important data) at c:\VID. We have an FTP account where the site admin has given us he following connection/login information:
FTP Server (host): ftp.myserver.com
Username: ftpuser
Password: ftppass

The first task is to define a Source->Destination(Target) folder pair, add some options to it, and save it as our sync definition. In this case the source folder is local, the destination is remote, so this is an LTR sync (see Folder Sync Concepts Click the New Sync Definition button, that gives you the options window. Your sync source will be c:\VID, just click the local browse button just to the right of the source path, navigate and select c:\VID, click OK. e are back to the Options window, the source path is now set. To set the destination folder, click the Remote Browse button to the right of the Destination path. This brings up the Remote Login Panel:

On this panel, enter the protocol (FTP) , host (ftp.myserver.com), user (ftpuser), password (ftppass) and the full path of the remote folder if it is known already. If you copying the path of a remote folder from another app and it is a full URL (so it looks something like ftp://somehost/some/path), then copy the path portion of the url (/some/path) into the path field.
Do not forget to properly set the protocol button because most hosts accept only one protocol, either FTP or SFTP. The port field is usually left empty, some servers deploy extra security by using non-standard ports. If you have been given such a port along with the connection info, enter it into the port field. Otherwise, leave it empty.

If the remote path is not known, you can browse the remote system. Use the Browse button to browse and find the remote folder path *after* you properly set the protocol and all the host/user/pass data. AASync will login using this data and let you browse the filesystem of the remote host, even create a new folder.

IMPORTANT! If you browse a host with a different checter encoding, you MUST set the encoding to that of the remote host before you start browsing. Otherwise, you may not see any contents of the remote host and browsing will fail.

Once the path is set, click OK, and you are finished with the most important part: the source and destination are defined. Now, lets set various options. Leave the sync mode Automatic (details in Sync Options) One of the folders must be local, as Remote-to-Remote sync is not permitted. Set various options, then click "OK" to save the sync definition. At this point you are ready to run a sync operation.

Optimizations:

• What to back up, what not to back up ?? - A very important question. Lets say, you think backing up your home directory is important. You have plenty of external or FTP storage, why not? Well, at the end it is not a good idea to back up the entire home directory as a single sync. Reason? It is usually huge, contains a lot of useless junk you may not even know about. For instance HOME/Library/Caches can contain gigabytes of data from previous web browsings, downloads etc. More importantly, a lot of these are transient files, they come and go, they can even vanish during the sync process causing sync errors. If you really take a look at how much stuff in your home directory is really important, you realize that with a little organization you can group your files folders such that the important (read: needs to be backed up) data is separated into folders away from the useless data that you can always reproduce later, such as downloaded dmg's, apps distributions etc. Within your imprtant data you can again separate the sensitive data you need to store encrypted, such as bank records, personal files, etc.. that you should set up a separate encrypted backup to keep that data private.
  If you do this, your files will be easier to find, the backup will go much faster, putting a lot less pressure on your network resources. Remember, uploading large distribution files on FTP can take a long time, while the really important data is waiting, and can even change (!) before it gets backed up. If you have set up several sync to back up various data folders, you can run them scheduled, one after another in a Chain Sync.
• Why does it take such a looooong time ?? OK, so you did what you could in organizing data, but there is still many gigabytes worth of stuff that needs to be synced to an external location. If you just set up a sync with the default mode, the sync takes several hours...something must be done to make it faster. By default, AASync does two things that make the sync error free:
  
  • Checking the destination folder to make sure your files are really there. So you can do some tradeoffs here. If you are sure that your destination folder will not be changed by someone else "Always Check Destination" can be turned off. In this case AASync will rely on monitoring changes in the source folder, and uploading the files that been added/changed. Warning: In this mode AASync will not detect if someone simply removes a file from the destination folder!
  • Checksumming (content checking) all files smaller then 10MB to make sure the file really did not change. Normally, one can rely on metadata, such as size and modification date, but these are not a 100% reliable. On large backups you can change this from Default to Off, in that case AASync will rely on metadata only, speeding up the sync process. On local backups this is usually good enough.

AASync is a trademark of Robert Vasvari.

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