About   Download   Development

» Project Home

With Black Mirror you can easily synchronize your data between two or more computers and back it up on an external storage device at the same time.

The Basic Principle

If you have two computers which should sync their files with each other, you just need an external hard disk, which will Black Mirror automatically use as a backup storage. That way, you can never accidentally delete a file forever.
And because Black Mirror is written in Perl, it is platform-independent, i.e., you can use the exact same program on every computer to keep them in sync, no matter what OS they're running. Because of the current market situation, however, Black Mirror has been particularly optimized for Microsoft Windows® and Mac OS X (Darwin).

Getting Started

After installing the application with the supplied setup script, you can simply start backing up your files with a command that looks like that:

blkmror {desired_directory} {external_harddisk}

Of course, the two arguments in braces are two paths to the respective folders or drives. Then you just sync the files with

blkmror {external_harddisk} {desired_directory}

to the other computer. From now on, you always can reverse the process to keep your files in sync, you don't even have to run through the whole process. The only thing to remember is that the first path (the source directory) is the one that contains the "more recent" files. (Don't worry if you swapped the arguments, nothing would happen.)

Let the Computer Do the Work

To let your computer execute the repetitive job of syncing data, you can write a small script (say, a bash or sh script on Unixes, and a batch file on Windows) that calls Black Mirror for all the paths you wish. And when you've done that you can, e.g., create a cron job, which will be executed every day or week or month at a specific time, depending on your backup strategy. Windows, too, lets you plan automated tasks in the control panel.