Intro
I was thinking about doing something with photos – not exactly sure what yet. But since I have this nice decicated server with lots of space, it’s a great place to store my collection of thousands of photos. But how to upload them and keep the server copy in sync?
The traditional Unix approach might be to install rsync, and I suppose I could have gotten it to work. But I decided to see what commercial package was out there. I settled on Goodsync. One of the inducements is that it has support for sftp servers. Or so it says.
Well, I got it to work. I decided to use a private key approach to login. I generated my key pair with cygwin’s openssl. It all seemed fine, however, I couldn’t use that key in GoodSync. Based on something I read in their documentation, I decided it might need a key generated by putty. So I downloaed puttygen and generated another keypair. I then had to make a saved session in putty, which I had never done before, using that keypair. I tested with putty’s psftp -load session. It worked.
So I loaded up that session in GoodSync. It began to work. I could successfully analyze.
I thought JPEG files were compressible. I played around with setting the compress option in putty, but it didn’t seem to matter one bit. Then I ran gzip on one of the files and saw essentially no reduction in size from compression.
So now the files are crawling from my home PC over to the server. It will take days to finish. I bought the professional version of GoodSync and run multiple jobs simultaneously, which is kind of nice and a slightly better use of the bandwidth.
Open issues include: would GoodSync’s native server offer me any advantages? Does it even run on Linux? What program do I use to display the images? Is there a scheduler for GoodSync?
Conclusion
GoodSync seems to be a solid program for syncing files from a PC to an sftp server, although that is not its primary focus, The GUI is nice and makes it easy to set up sync jobs.
2 replies on “Experimenting with GoodSync”
[…] As previously documented I use Goodsync to sync all my home pictures to my server. So all pictures are present in various folders. But they’re big. I needed thumbnails for this gallery app. I wrote a very crude thumbnail generator. I basically have to edit it each time I work on a different directory. One day I’ll fix it up: <?php function createThumbs( $pathToImages, $pathToThumbs, $thumbWidth ) { // open the directory $dir = opendir( $pathToImages ); // loop through it, looking for any/all JPG files: while (false !== ($fname = readdir( $dir ))) { // parse path for the extension $info = pathinfo($pathToImages . $fname); // continue only if this is a JPEG image if ( strtolower($info['extension']) == 'jpg' ) { echo "Creating thumbnail for {$fname} <br />"; // load image and get image size $img = imagecreatefromjpeg( "{$pathToImages}{$fname}" ); $width = imagesx( $img ); $height = imagesy( $img ); // calculate thumbnail size $new_width = $thumbWidth; $new_height = floor( $height * ( $thumbWidth / $width ) ); // create a new temporary image $tmp_img = imagecreatetruecolor( $new_width, $new_height ); // copy and resize old image into new image imagecopyresized( $tmp_img, $img, 0, 0, 0, 0, $new_width, $new_height, $width, $height ); // save thumbnail into a file imagejpeg( $tmp_img, "{$pathToThumbs}{$fname}" ); } } // close the directory closedir( $dir ); } // call createThumb function and pass to it as parameters the path // to the directory that contains images, the path to the directory // in which thumbnails will be placed and the thumbnail's width. // We are assuming that the path will be a relative path working // both in the filesystem, and through the web for links createThumbs("img/2012_05/","thumb/",200); ?> […]
GoodSync now runs on Linux/UNIX, Server included.
http://www.goodsync.com/platforms/unix