Sync Local Folder with NAS storage device

Question

I have a local folder Photos which keeps growing as I import pictures from the camera. The question: is it somehow possible to easily synchronise the folder with a NAS storage device?
I stumbled over this answer, but I wonder if it is also possible with the "onboard tools" of Mac OSX.

Actually I would not mind using the command line and kicking of the process manually

Answer 1

I would recommend that you look into using rsync. This is a very powerful and widely used backup tool that is included in OSX. You control it via the terminal, or via a script. Meaning that it can be scheduled to run backups at certain times or manually when you invoke it.

The prerequisite is that your NAS has an rsync server daemon running on it.

The beauty of rsync is that you can tell it to incrementally update files - that is, it will only upload files that are new, or have changed. (It can even upload the bits of existing files that have changed). It's very quick and efficient.

Check that your NAS supports rsync and then read into it, rsync is a large topic to cover here but I highly recommend it!

Typically, you'll run the command like this:

rsync [options] source destination

Check this page out for some good explanation and usage examples.

Answer 2

I believe you can use rsync to accomplish this task:

rsync -avz /<path to Photos>/ /Volumes/<NAS Mount>/<path to Photos>

The man page provides some more examples a well.