Using rsync to Mirror two CVS Repositories

I have two personal Linux servers, named Mercury (located in Lowell, MA) and Pluto (located in Cambridge, MA). Monday through Friday I stay in my Cambridge apartment to be close to work and on the weekends I go back to Lowell.

I've been storing all of my projects, both work and personal, in a CVS repository on Mercury. A few weeks ago, however, there was a power outage in Lowell during the middle of the week and Mercury didn't turn back on (probably because I don't have the "PWRON After PWR-Fail" BIOS option set to Former-STS, if it even has that option). So, since the computer wasn't on, I wasn't able to commit or sync any of the projects I was working on. This would normally not be a problem, however I have several staging scripts setup on Mercury which I use frequently to test my work -- so basically I was dead in the water.

After this incident, I realized I needed to mirror my CVS repository to prevent anything like that from happening again. This mirror would not only allow me to access the same CVS repository in the event that I was unable to reach one of my servers, but it would also act as a backup in case I somehow lost all the data on one of the servers.

After a little research using Google, I found this site which basically explains the -a option for rsync:

By far the most useful option is -a (--archive). This acts like the corresponding option to cp; rsync will:

* recurse subdirectories (-r);
* recreate soft links (-l);
* preserve permissions (-p);
* preserve timestamps (-t);
* attempt to copy devices (if invoked as root) (-D);
* preserve group information (-g) (and userid, if invoked as root) (-o).

Using that info, I ran the following command from Mercury (l.rd82.net is the DNS address I have mapped to it's public IP, and c.rd82.net is mapped to Pluto's public IP)

rsync -a /home/cvs [email protected]:/home

That's it! After waiting a few minutes (it took several minutes the first time) my entire CVS repository was copied to Pluto, my Cambridge Linux server. Of course, before I ran that command I had to create the CVS repository on Pluto first by running cvs init /home/cvs. After the rsync command completed, I added a CVS repository for c.rd82.net in Eclipse and confirmed that all my projects were there.

The only thing left to do is to setup a cron job to run the command every night. Of course, I'll need to setup SSH keys so the rsync command can run without user input, but thats easy.