Have I just royally screwed myself with rSync/arRsync?

[gnomeisland]

So I'm collaborating on a Soundtrack Pro audio project with an editor. We meet every other day or so, and sync the project folder with arRsync (bidirectional).

Reason being we are both working on segments of the larger project but never on the same segment (ie we never touch the same multitrack file or project files). This has worked great half dozen times but now a file has mysteriously reverted to its original, pre-edited, state. Brilliant me, made a back up but then over wrote the back-up with a later version which seems to after this cluster f**k happened and my tertiary backup (timemachine) didn't have his media asset partition on its list of things to back up.

Aside from being certain that the file in questions was not opened/manipulated by the other computer after it was manipulated by the computer where it was actually edited, there are actually two media files (SoundTrack Audio Project files) making up the multi track file in question. One of these is FINE. And one devolved.

A. Is this an rSync/arRsync issue, and is there an alternative who won't cost me valuable time?

B. Is there any (relatively) easy way to get this file back?? Its about 3-4 hours of work lost. I don't want to spend tons of $$$ or another 4-6 hours trying to recover it but I also don't want to redo it.

I know this reads like a word problem from hell, but I'm hoping someone here can help me out. . .

 

[angelwatt]

From the description alone it's hard to say what may have happened. I use rsync daily and haven't run into that kind of issue.

For what you're doing though, you should probably take a look at Subversion (or CVS), which is a version control system. It keeps track of older versions of files similar to a backup. I use it for my web site files so I can revert back to previous versions of files if I run into a problem. Definitely worth a look see considering how you're using the files.

 

[rowsdower]

Are there any special characters in the filename? From the rsync FAQ:

Something else that can trip up rsync is a filesystem changeing the filename behind the scenes. This can happen when a filesystem changes an all-uppercase name into lowercase, or when it decomposes UTF-8 behind your back.

An example of the latter can occur with HFS+ on Mac OS X: if you copy a directory with a file that has a UTF-8 character sequence in it, say a 2-byte umlaut-u (\0303\0274), the file will get that character stored by the filesystem using 3 bytes (\0165\0314\0210), and rsync will not know that these differing filenames are the same file (it will, in fact, remove a prior copy of the file if --delete is enabled, and then recreate it).

You can avoid a charset problem by passing an appropriate --iconv option to rsync that tells it what character-set the source files are, and what character-set the destination files get stored in. For instance, the above Mac OS X problem would be dealt with by using --iconv=UTF-8,UTF8-MAC (UTF8-MAC is a pseudo-charset recognized by Mac OS X iconv in which all characters are decomposed).

 

[gnomeisland]

Are there any special characters in the filename? From the rsync FAQ:

The only special character is a dash '-' but that's present in both names so I don't think that is it. Thanks for the suggestion though. Any other thoughts?

 

[gnomeisland]

From the description alone it's hard to say what may have happened. I use rsync daily and haven't run into that kind of issue.

For what you're doing though, you should probably take a look at Subversion (or CVS), which is a version control system. It keeps track of older versions of files similar to a backup. I use it for my web site files so I can revert back to previous versions of files if I run into a problem. Definitely worth a look see considering how you're using the files.

I looked at CVS years ago for another project, and while I am not afraid of a command line, I'm out of habit and it seemed like to much overhead for a small two man project. I'm now contemplating switching to Chronosync. Even their free/demo version should cover the size of project I'm working on now and it has an 'archive' option. Any experience with that software?

 

[angelwatt]

I looked at CVS years ago for another project, and while I am not afraid of a command line, I'm out of habit and it seemed like to much overhead for a small two man project. I'm now contemplating switching to Chronosync. Even their free/demo version should cover the size of project I'm working on now and it has an 'archive' option. Any experience with that software?

Haven't used Chronosync, but just as a FYI for CVS/Subversion, they have GUI front ends that make it easy to use. A few programs have the interaction integrated into them too, like BBEdit so I can submit new changes from the program rather than opening Terminal. I also like using SvnX as a interface for Subversion.