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The ByteWeiser project is a simple file synchronization tool that compares two files blockwise and only replaces the different bytes to reduce write operations on the hard disk.
Initially developed to accelerate the backup of virtual machine images, ByteWeiser compares the binary data of two files, by running through them block by block. If the current block of the output file is different from that of the input file, the block of the output file will be overwritten with the one from the input file.
With its operating principle it reduces the write operations on the hard disk.
You could also use rsync with delta compression for that. However, ByteWeiser seems to be faster in some cases. Both tools have a completely different functional principle, where ByteWeiser is the one that "mindlessly" (simply) processes the data instead of using algorithms and checksums.
The performance of ByteWeiser has been tested and compared with the results of rsync.
Details can be found here inside the wiki.
In order to run ByteWeiser, the Python 3.x framework (version 3.2 or higher is recommended) must be installed on the system.
There is no official version for Python 2.x, but if you need that for whatever reason, you can try refactoring the syntax from Python 3.x to version 2.x using the 3to2 tool.
However, there is no guarantee that this works properly or at all.
The ByteWeiser project has been tested on Linux as well as Windows.
Nevertheless, it should work on other platforms, but also without any guarantee.
Inside the docs sub-directory, there are plain text files containing the documentation for each component with further information and usage examples.
Any suggestions, questions, bugs to report or feedback to give?
You can contact me by sending an email to dev@urbanware.org or by opening a GitHub issue (which I would prefer if you have a GitHub account).
Further information can be found inside the contact.txt file.
- Actually, the project should be called "BlockWeiser", because the binary data is being processed blockwise instead of bytewise. If you want it bytewise, just set the buffer size to
1. - The project name is derived from the German adjective "byteweise" ("bytewise").