Syncing media between multiple media servers
#1
I've spent the day researching and looking around at a number of options to sync media between 2 locations, and figured I'd ask the gurus here for any suggestions.

I currently have a media server (FreeNAS with 6TB of space) that feeds the Boxee box that I have currently on my LAN. I'd like however to selectively sync some of the media on that server to another location that I will have just a raspberry pi running XBMC served up by a small linux box (pogoplug running arch) that will just have a 500GB drive connected to it. This location won't get used much, and is connected just over an internet connection that is mostly idle, so I wanted something low power but still serving up media locally.

For example, lets say I have:

[Folder: TV]
|
[Sub Folder: Show 1]
[Sub Folder: Show 2]
[Sub Folder: Show 3]
[Sub Folder: Show 4]
[Sub Folder: Show 5]

Folder: Movies]
|
[Sub Folder: Movies 1]
[Sub Folder: Movies 2]
[Sub Folder: Movies 3]
[Sub Folder: Movies 4]
[Sub Folder: Movies 5]
[Sub Folder: Movies 6]


As I don't have as much storage at the second location and don't want to have to build out a whole NAS box just to sync everything, my idea would be to just select maybe Show 1, 2 and 5 from the TV folders, and Movie 3, 4 and 6 to have sync'd between the main site and the remote location.

I'd thought about OwnCloud, or Torrent Sync, but neither of those seem to allow you to select individual directories in a top level directory to sync. I could add the separate TV and Movie Folders, but on the remote side they'd all end up in one folder, which isn't optimal for scanning in XBMC or the like.

The second piece of the puzzle would be how to select these files to be sync'd to the remote end. I figure a remote desktop or port forward to the web gui of the sync program would work so that I could set the files to sync even away from the main site.

Anyway, any ideas or thoughts? Anyone else done something similar within a local site, or across multiple HTPCs? I'm now thinking I could set up some sort of rsync script with a web gui frontend, where the media server would send files over via rsync every so often.
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#2
Since you're only talking about up to 500GB of storage, why not set up a "remote" folder on your 6TB NAS that contains all the media you want to sync to your remote location, and then run an rsync job at your remote location that pulls the media down from the "remote" folder? Anything added to (or deleted from) the "remote" folder on the NAS will be rsynced to the remote location. Sure, it involves duplication*, but unless you're short of space on your 6TB NAS, this is most likely the easiest solution to implement.

There are more complex solutions, that would avoid duplication (such as "driving" rsync using a list of files read from a text file) but this increases the maintenance/complexity overhead. Developing a web gui is taking that complexity to a new level...

* You might be able to avoid duplication by using symbolic links.
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