So months ago we were discussing ways of synchronizing files between two servers (for instance the images on a content staging and multiple production servers). My boss kinda put together a list of links for rsync, an open source utility used mainly for quickly transferring files. That email sat in my inbox for the last couple months and only until today did I start trying to get rsync to work. There aren’t any Windows binaries available on the site, which wasn’t a big deal because they gave directions for compiling it here. In order to compile, you need cgywin, so I downloaded and installed that, but the download/install I did for some reason didn’t include make which is required in order to compile rsync. So I went back and re-installed cygwin, this time exploding the options looking for make, only to find that cgywin includes rsync as an option! No need to compile for Windows, just download cygwin and specify that you want the rsync package installed!

I haven’t gotten there yet, but I plan to get rsync running as a service under Windows 2000 on a couple boxes (following these directions). You can find further directions and examples here. I’ll update later on how it works syncing up a couple websites.