Doing the "initial sync" locally

[markowe]

Have scoured the forum and FAQ and haven't quite got my head round this question: so what is a good model for doing the "initial sync" of my data locally.

 

E.g. I have four or five folders on 3 different locally networked computers totalling perhaps 150Gb in total which I want to sync to an external drive on a PC at a remote location primarily for backup purposes. If I just set up a regular sync to that location my 150Gb will probably take a lifetime to sync "over the wire".

 

So can I just initially do a normal file copy locally to my external drive to get the bulk of the data on to the drive, and then take that drive to the remote location and set up BT Sync there and carry on syncing over the net, but obviously with a lot less data to get synced up?

 

If that is possible, what do I need to be careful of in terms of folder names/paths to make sure that BT Sync navigates the structure correctly (I don't know whether it creates a path name according to the local drive name, folder name or... what exactly)?

 

I can kind of try this myself, but it might be a big time-waster so figured I would ask first..!

[Harold Feit]

All paths are relative to the root path defined in the sync folder location.

As long as you define the root path correctly, it doesn't matter if the files are copied to a location in advance of setting up the sync.

 

I'm actually setting up to do this at a firm locally. Initial sync will be on-site and updates will be stored off-site.

[disconnect]

I've just done a kinda local sync today. Just make sure that your paths are the same relative to the syncing root.

I've done this: I have a quad core X86 windows PC  with my data, i have an ARM small pc, used for NAS/dlna/etc, and secondary mirrored storage of the data from the pc), with linux.

That ARM pc have much slower CPU than the x86, so it would take days for btsync to index all.

Because of the data itself was synced more or less before (by attaching the HDD of the arm pc to the "big" pc), i've indexed the data on the windows pc, then searched for the btsync database, (users\username\roaming\bittorrent sync) then i've opened the database with an sqlite database editor, and ran

 

update files set path = replace(path, '\', '/'); query to convert the windows style path separators ( \ backslash) to normal path separators ( / slash), then just copied the db file to the linux pc btsync folder, started btsync, and all of the files were indexed

However it would be better if btsync would use platform independent path separators in database, so no need for replacing the path separators.