File synchronization options for large amounts of files

Handruin

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Or misguided. You have some level of hatred towards people that have done nothing to you based on their job, usage, or even support of a specific Adobe product called Photoshop. Nothing in life says you have to use or support this product or any other product by Adobe. You choose to.
 

Mercutio

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I have a specific level of hatred for Adobe that extends to people who somehow materially support it. Like a small number of other companies, I do not believe that it deserves to exist and I see no problem with judging others whom I believe to be part of the problem.
 

Handruin

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That's an incredibly sad to hear that you would dedicate that much time and energy to extend and judge other people based on something you can easily avoid in your life. In the case of Photoshop, how are supporters and users of this product part of your problem? You've not listed a viable alternative to their product. Last I used gimp and pain.net, they didn't even come close to filling the gap. I don't care if their UI is different if the product doesn't functionally do the same task.
 

Gilbo

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PowerFolder might be worth a try. Although there's a cloud storage component, it's optional; you can use the product to sync directly between any two PCs without touching the cloud.

...

Howell's suggestion of Beyond Compare may work - it has FTP support for nested directory comparisons - but I've never used it across the internet for such a large number of files, so you would have to try it and see. Really good product though, no Microsoft tools involved.

Thanks guys. I'm testing a couple different options, and both those look like pretty credible products that I'm going to try out. I'm definitely going to post back when I find an option that works.
 

Mercutio

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Photoshop users are paying for a product that supports the ongoing pain of Adobe's shitty security and update practices. As a company, it creates more stupid and unnecessary work for me than any other organization in the last 10 years. The whole company is getting painted with that brush and moreover, it unquestionably deserves it.

Your pro-Photoshop position sounds very much like that of a Windows user a decade ago. "This is the way software is and we just have to like it this way" is not an answer that works for me. Paint.net and the gimp are both perfectly good tools that do exactly what they say they will.
 

MaxBurn

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I'm still following this thread I really need to get beyond copy paste for my backups.
 

Handruin

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Photoshop users are paying for a product that supports the ongoing pain of Adobe's shitty security and update practices. As a company, it creates more stupid and unnecessary work for me than any other organization in the last 10 years. The whole company is getting painted with that brush and moreover, it unquestionably deserves it.

Your pro-Photoshop position sounds very much like that of a Windows user a decade ago. "This is the way software is and we just have to like it this way" is not an answer that works for me. Paint.net and the gimp are both perfectly good tools that do exactly what they say they will.

It's your choice to support that "stupid and unnecessary" work. If you don't like it, don't support it.

My position is very much that way. If you need to use their software because it offers something that the competition doesn't, then you put up with the imperfections. It's the typical life tradeoffs. I'm not willing to make my life more difficult when I don't hate a company. I could simply take your path and petition using their software and then I'd be less productive and more frustrated using the alternatives...but hell yeah, damn that company that's made me support their products. I'll take pain and suffer instead! A decade ago I'd rather deal with windows XP than Linux. Linux has its place, but a non-frustrating common-purpose desktop it was not. Not even Lindows (Linspire) made it worth it for me.

I'll conceded that pain.net offers a decent UI and feature set for the price, but gimp...far worse than anything Adobe offers with Photoshop. I just installed the latest version for Windows and it's exactly the same in terms of UI and painful layout as it was years ago when I tried to use it.
 

Mercutio

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It's your choice to support that "stupid and unnecessary" work. If you don't like it, don't support it.

Unfortunately, there's only one site that I support where I have complete enough control to absolutely prevent anyone from installing software I truly don't like. Which means that I have to run WMI queries on dozens of machines to find the one where someone reinstalled Acrobat Reader version 8 for the fifth time despite the fact that they have at least two other fully functional PDF readers on their system.

Adobe is a support nightmare.
 

Handruin

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Unfortunately, there's only one site that I support where I have complete enough control to absolutely prevent anyone from installing software I truly don't like. Which means that I have to run WMI queries on dozens of machines to find the one where someone reinstalled Acrobat Reader version 8 for the fifth time despite the fact that they have at least two other fully functional PDF readers on their system.

Adobe is a support nightmare.

Just for clarity, I was never suggesting it wasn't a support nightmare or that it was secure, etc. I personally don't like Adobe reader or flash. I use an alternative for Reader and minimally use flash for personal use. I have to use it at work because many of our product's GUIs are built using Adobe Flex. I do however find value in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. I realize there are a lot better alternatives to Premiere than there are to Photoshop...but the price was right.
 

Mercutio

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In high school, my geometry teacher had a thing for hitting on 14 year old girls. He seemed like an OK guy, other than the time he got one of those girls pregnant.
 

MaxBurn

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I actually used to use beyond compare for USB sticks. Does it scale well to TB of files and tens of thousands of files?
 

Gilbo

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I still haven't found something that seems to work well, but I haven't checked all the recommendations yet. I'm definitely going to post a summary but it's probably a month away at least as I have two weeks of computer-less vacation coming up. The big problem is that these large file synchronizations seem to be revealing stability issues in some systems that were otherwise hidden.



I'm encountering a lot of stability issues when trying to do multi-Terabyte copies or synchronizations. Several systems that are otherwise rock solid, hard freeze or BSOD when confronted with copying or synchronizing 4-5 Terabytes of data.

All these systems pass Memtest86+ for days without errors. They also have no problem with Prime95, and there are no errors with a CHKDSK /r. I'm beginning to think it's a Windows issue --that Windows just can't handle that much data movement sustained over a day or two. Haven't tried Linux yet though. In terms of hardware, I'm down to replacing motherboards or even the HDDs on a couple boxes --they're the only possible faults. I've literally swapped out SSDs, PSUs, SATA cables, and video cards on a couple systems now.

These issues seem to persist whether it's over the LAN or if I physically move disks between computers :( . The only consistent thing seems to be the volume of data.



Anyone else ever try to copy 4-5 TB of data between systems? Did it work?
 

MaxBurn

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Yeah you're going to have some real trouble if the systems themselves are having stability issues.

I also don't have problems using plain windows copy paste for say 6TB at a time. I do 40GB transfers all the time. That copy program mentioned in the utility section is pretty handy too.

That's about as advanced as my backup process is at the moment.
 

Mercutio

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Anyone else ever try to copy 4-5 TB of data between systems? Did it work?

I do it more than occasionally. I suspect that if you're trying rsync or something similar, you're probably running the system out of RAM. My big server has 16GB now, and my older file servers have 8GB or 12GB each.

I usually do my initial file copy with normal operating system tools and don't worry about trying to sync until I have the vast majority of the data on one side or the other. I don't know if that's possible in your case or not.

You can also try breaking your job up into several smaller pieces, so that no single task is doing everything.

Another hilarious thing you find out when you're syncing across operating systems is that something as teeny tiny as slightly different rules about path depths or file naming can sink a huge file copy.
 

Gilbo

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Well, I definitely need to sort out these stability issues before I start blaming sync software --seeing as how no one else has problems...

Mercutio: The machines at issue have 16GB of RAM, so I don't think that's the problem. Hard freezes using Teracopy or Windows' native file copier.

ddrueding: No sleep, HDD spin down or anything like that. One of the first things I checked, before I replaced the SSD, the PSU, reinstalled the OS...



I guess I'll be RMAing the motherboard next. Hopefully that fixes it. Anyone have these types of issues with Z68 boards running Intel RST?
 

ddrueding

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I only have one Z68 board at the moment, and it hasn't been stable enough to even worry about RST. I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot it yet, but it won't even Prime95.
 

Handruin

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Weird, it crashes my windows machine like it's a Mac every time I use it.
 

MaxBurn

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I think that's the point but it is a little to meta for me to be sure.
 
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