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Clayton's Tech Bits

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008

/Admin/backups/unison: Unison: Easy File Synchronization

Any discussion of backup strategies would be remiss without mentioning unison[1]. Unison synchronizes the files in two different directories, on the same machine or on different machines, so that they are exactly the same. It will copy the most recent version of any file in either direction, and will prompt for user input if a file has been changed on both ends since the last sync (best to try to avoid this, obviously....) Unison also runs on almost anything: various flavors of *nix, Mac OSX, Windows....

Unison can be run from the command-line or in a GTK GUI ("unison-gtk", on Debian Linux). One caveat though, if you frequently experience conflicts (files changed on both ends) you really need to have the GUI available at the machine where you are sitting. Resolving a lot of conflicts from the command-line is a PITA.

After initial setup of a configuration file, this one for example to synchronize my desktop to my server for this blog:

x24:~/.unison$ cat techblogISP.prf
root = /home/user/public_html/techblog/
root = ssh://user_techblog@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net//home/public
ignore = Path {.unison}

unison is very easy and fast to use (length of time depending, of course, on the number of MB to transfer and the network speed). Frequent ad-hoc backups become easy and normal.

[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

posted at: 04:44 | path: /Admin/backups/unison | permanent link to this entry

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008