Transparent, Distributed File Synchronization

One product helped nearly to "market" by Google's recent Summer of Code is James Anderson's open-source Tsync. Tsync keeps a set of files consistent across many machines, even if those devices involve differing degrees of connectivity and availability. "It does so while requiring minimal effort from the user," says Anderson. "At the same time it maintains security, robustness to failure, and fast performance." If you're managing clusters of web content delivery servers, this might just be the thing for you (once its production).Anderson's invention grew out of his own frustration with keeping documents updated across the four PCs and laptops he uses between work and home. "I found it very tedious to constantly synchronize my data among the four machines," said Anderson. "It was cumbersome to keep track of which files I had last modified on which machines, and when to synchronize them." Traditional synchronization tools, such as Rsync and Unison, require that the user manually synchronize any files after changing them, and those tools are designed only to synchronize a pair of devices. The Tsync model, on the other hand, allows the user to write a simple configuration file describing which directories should be synchronized, and listing one or more other hosts that are part of the Tsync group. The Tsync project has recently been moved onto SourceForge where a beta version of a Linux RPM is presently available for download.