FoldersSynchronizer large file copy bug: a follow-up

Regarding yesterday's item on problems backing up large files with FoldersSynchronizer:

Susan Williams (who was the person we cited yesterday) adds: "The developer has been able to reproduce the problem and is working to correct it. He said FoldersSynchronizer will not copy files over around 1GB, but I would be careful with anything that's larger than 500 MB. He has released a new version that will, at least, alert users to this bug, reporting an error message for large files the program can't copy."

Indeed: FoldersSynchronizer 3.0B7 is just out: It adds "a control when FS can't copy a very large file (> 1GB). In this case FS will report the error and the original file will be left untouched." The new release also fixes a bug in the Everyday timer, and adds controls to the fields of the Set Filter dialog.

John Labovitz notes: "As far as I know, the only backup program that will verify file contents is Retrospect. Most of the other utilities - and I've tried quite a few - use only the files' last-modification dates to determine whether a file has changed. This can be a problem, especially when trying to synchronize between two machines that have slightly different time settings (although some utilities have settings to account for slight time shifts), or whose directory structure has lost some metadata (icon or bundle information, for example)."

Chris Stone offers: "I just happened to post Part 5 of my Learning the Terminal series which outlines how to create a simple cron job to back up your Entourage data folders regularly and automatically." Note: We found this of interest, especially its comparison of the cp, CpMac, ditto, and rsync commands. However, this is mainly a solution for people who are comfortable working with Terminal, or want to become so.

Update: Thomas Thatcher suggests trying the <psync> command (available here). He writes: "I've been using it for nearly a year now and have never had a problem with it. If something goes awry, it's easy to restore with psync and it's fast, also does incremental backups, and works in the background too. One other thing that Chris's article doesn't seem to mention is that using ditto, when it encounters a locked file, it will choke on it and skip on to the next directory thereby leaving the remainder of the directory with the locked file incompletely backed up. That's another reason to favor psync over ditto."