2011-08-17, 21:18
I was originally going to go the RSYNC route as well just like you said, and was going to use a cron job to move the data back and forth, but finding a decently working rsync server for Windows was just a pain.
If my server would have been Linux I would have gone that route for sure, just because you never have to worry about running out of space in your drop box folder.
To answer your question though, if you use a cron job that syncs at start up, and then every 2 minutes after that chances that you will miss an update are pretty slim. As you said, rsync will not hammer the discs, and the split second access is nothing to worry about either.
For me it ended up being too much of a hassle. Tryign to figure out how I had to sync between the devices (too many what-if scenarios; is the bedroom one out of date, but the living room didn't sync? etc) Dropbox does it all rather elegantly in the background with minimal configuration, and you even get the "benefit" of "offsite backup". Plus it does local lan replication so you shouldn't have to worry too much about replication between clients on the lan.
I sync my thumbs folder to dropbox, my db server (windows) and two revo's running xbmc-live, and never had a problem. I would like to clean out the thumbs folder/textures.db eventually, but I have not had a chance to really do that yet.
If my server would have been Linux I would have gone that route for sure, just because you never have to worry about running out of space in your drop box folder.
To answer your question though, if you use a cron job that syncs at start up, and then every 2 minutes after that chances that you will miss an update are pretty slim. As you said, rsync will not hammer the discs, and the split second access is nothing to worry about either.
For me it ended up being too much of a hassle. Tryign to figure out how I had to sync between the devices (too many what-if scenarios; is the bedroom one out of date, but the living room didn't sync? etc) Dropbox does it all rather elegantly in the background with minimal configuration, and you even get the "benefit" of "offsite backup". Plus it does local lan replication so you shouldn't have to worry too much about replication between clients on the lan.
I sync my thumbs folder to dropbox, my db server (windows) and two revo's running xbmc-live, and never had a problem. I would like to clean out the thumbs folder/textures.db eventually, but I have not had a chance to really do that yet.