Metadataring

The last couple of days I have just been writing articles for my photography tips website. Yes, it took me a whole day to write each article.

When doing my backup each morning, I noticed that Synkron was all copying lots of files in my 'Internet Stuff' folder, even though these files shouldn't have changed. On looking into it, I found that Synkron was following symbolic links to files, and copying the file instead of the link. Next backup it would do exactly the same thing.

On looking further into it, I also found that Synkron was not backing up directories that were symbolic links, nor was it backing up the link to the directory. So there were a few issues for me here:

• Links to directories not backed up (possibly because the links were pointing to directories that did not exist)
• Linked files being backed up instead of the links
• Files being needlessly copied every backup

I seem to be using the latest version of Synkron (1.6.2), and I couldn't find any info about whether it can be set to copy links and not follow them. So I am going to have to split my backup process into two, using Synkron for one part, and Beyond Compare for the other part.

The thing I like about Synkron is that you can backup from different locations on different drives to locations on a single backup drive, through it's use of tabs. Just set up a new tab for each location you want to backup from / to, and then choose 'Sync all' to run through all the tabs. All other backup software I've used assumes a straight sync with the same directory structure on your backup drive and a single drive you are backing up. One solution to this is the use of links, but since I don't want links followed, this wouldn't really work.

So I am splitting my backup process in two, I'll have to first use Beyond Compare to backup files from one disk that are have the same structure on the backup disk. Then I'll have to use Synkron to backup files from varied locations on another disk.

After sorting that out, I spent most of the rest of today writing descriptions and adding metadata to some photos.

In the afternoon and evening I also played on Civ IV for a bit and watched an episode of Sliders and wrote up a recipe.