If you at all frequent our news, then you are probably aware that I use Linux most of the time. It’s on my main work machine, while Windows is on the gaming rig and also the primary benchmarking machine that’s responsible for most of our performance-related articles. You might also know about rsync, an application designed for Linux that compares two directories (remote ones also) and can make sure they are exact duplicates, if that’s your goal.
Rsync is a powerful tool and has easily proven to be one of my most relied-upon. I’ve come to enjoy it so much, that I’ve even written an entire article around it. But, it does have some downsides. For some reason lately, whenever I attempt to rsync a local folder to my NAS box for backup, instead of filling in the blanks, it actually overwrites what is there, meaning that it’s essentially copying that 130GB folder on top of itself. For a network connection, that is one slow process.
With that frustration, I stumbled on Komparator, a KDE-based tool that acts as an rsync frontend. In my particular case, it actually worked better than rsync, because it allowed me to proceed with that previously mentioned task, but did so without overwriting files that were already on the target, aka: exactly what rsync should have done.
The program has many options, and even allows you to save presets in case you run the same process regularly. The three main options are to allow you to first find duplicate files, find missing files and also find newer files… and all will be displayed in an easy-to-read manner. For some, that will be far better than dealing with a command-line.
Komparator is somewhat simple in design, but it does what it’s meant to do, and does it quite reliably. I rsync’d three different folders to my NAS box and it did so without issue. So if you are looking for an easy way to rsync and happen to use KDE, definitely check it out.
Source: Komparator at KDE-Apps