jasonvolpe / lou

Manage your ad-hoc syncs & backups.

Meet Lou.

He manages your rsyncs.

Lou was built for one purpose:

To manage ad-hoc directory backups & syncs to a remote server.

So, it does what Google Drive and Dropbox do but not as well?

Yes and no.

Here are some benefits

It's cheaper

If you already are paying for web hosting, then why pay for Drive or Dropbox? Lou helps you use the resources you already have.

It's flexible

Maybe you don't want to sync ALL your files to your work computer. Lou lets you sync only the stuff you want.

Installation

1. Clone Lou somewhere appropriate.
2. You might have chmod 755 lou.py
3. Create a symlink: ln -s /wherever_you_put/lou.py /somewhere_in_your_PATH/lou
4. In lou.py, change HOST and ROOT_DIRECTORY to [e-mail] and path_to_sync_to, respectively.

Using Lou

1. Try Lou out by running lou list at the command line. This command lists the directories you've synced. There probably won't be any listed at this point.
2. In a directory you'd like to sync, execute lou new dir_name to create a remote directory "dir_name" and lou push to push your local files to the remote host.
3. To pull files from a remote directory use the commaned lou pull dir_name where "dir_name" is the remote directory. Hint: use lou list to see which remote directories are available to pull.

How it works

Lou is just a simple rsync wrapper. It doesn't muck with anything on your remote server other than creating new directories and rsyncing inside your ROOT_DIRECTORY path. Lou remembers where to rsync by creating a .lou file in the directories you have synced.