A nerd’s valiant struggle

Lately I’ve been learning a bit of Cocoa with the help of Aaron Hillegass’s excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. The big mystery project I alluded to earlier is actually just a rewrite of iPodBackup. The interface is much improved, but I haven’t figured out a good way to monitor the size of the log file, so it’s not quite release quality yet. I may put it on hold until Apple gets its ass in gear and fixes rsync. If anyone is interested in beta testing what I’ve got so far, please drop me a line.

Just to rehash what I bitch about every time… There are two main versions of rsync for OS X, both so buggy it’s funny and sad at the same time. On one hand we have the version bundled with RsyncX, which has a bug where it can randomly crash and spit garbage into the log file until your hard drive is completely full. This has been reported to the author by me and others repeatedly to no avail.

On the other hand we have Apple’s version bundled with Tiger. This one is not known to go berzerk like RsyncX’s, but it does completely fail for no good reason depending on the details of what you’re backing up. It seems to have something to do with the number of files in the destination. Also, it’s inefficient because it re-copies all metadata every time it’s run, rather than only the changed items.

The result is that I need to provide RsyncX’s rsync as a fallback for all unlucky Tiger users, and implement a check to make sure the log file doesn’t explode. Things would be so much easier if Apple and the RsyncX guys would just fix their damn software. Write your congressperson.

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