Unison does not support hard links!
Unison File Synchronizer
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unison is the only bidirectional sync tool that I trust to get the details right. It is backed by a formal model with various proofs of correctness. That's just about the sync process/stages, the easy part that can actually be formalized. The "million fiddly things" are about OS and filesystem issues, incompatibilities, and so on, and Dropbox has a hugely larger test base for those things...
I disagree. POSIX, although somewhat dated, has provided a good enough abstraction layer for filesystems and OSs. My proof of this is the number of different and successful filesystems for Unix/Linux. If the abstraction didn't work, everyone would be forced to use the same filesystem. The issues and subtleties are with bidirectional sync. It is not "the easy part". Dropbox didn't get it right in the past, we have no…
>POSIX, although somewhat dated, has provided a good enough abstraction layer for filesystems and OSs.
First of all, POSIX semantics are not what Windows support. Second, even where available, POSIX is a tiny part of the possible issues. Adequate for naive apps that need to open or write some files, not for a reliable sync tool.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#63I can't praise Unison enough. I've been using it every day for over 10 years and is easily one of the most useful pieces of software I've ever come across. I've donated multiple times over the years.
"I can't praise Unison enough. I've been using it every day for over 10 years and is easily one of the most useful pieces of software I've ever come across." Unison was the first backup binary that we built into the rsync.net platform - breaking our original design goal of only offering client agnostic SSH and the tools that would run over that. Shortly afterward we also added rdiff-backup. Both of these tools were q…
restic isn't just for sftp, it supports bunch of cloud storages.
Also, open source but non free license but duplicacy, in my opinion is technically superior to restic.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
oof. I think we've gotten much different takeaways from The Lisp Curse.
Maybe, I really like Lisp and especially Scheme. Don't get me wrong. I just think that a lot of projects suffer from being written in a language with a small community or even, at the time of conception, a thriving yet fleeting community (Perl, Ruby, etc).
Unison seems to be maintained, there just isn't much to maintain. Perhaps being in C would attract a huge community to make up for the increased work required, or perhaps that wouldn't be sustainable and we're better off with projects that can better "hibernate".
Not C but not super powerful seems like the worst of both worlds.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#65Is this project still going? I used to use it a lot for duplicating my project directories between my lap PC and my home PC. It was so powerful and so useful at the time. Honestly I thought it had died. I use Syncthing now. It's really useful.
I recently switched from Syncthing to Unison, after getting tired of Syncthing either taking forever to sync anything or getting stuck altogether, with very little visibility or control over what it was doing. So far Unison (with fsmonitor) has ‘just worked’, with files updating immediately on save as I’d expect. (That said, one of the problems I encountered with Syncthing seemed to be that it wouldn’t properly recon…
Huh, I've had the opposite experience with Syncthing. It's basically just worked, it's been bulletproof. I'm not sure why the disparity.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#66A few years ago, I was working in a company that used a shared drive on a local Windows network. Several analysts and people from other departments would use the drive to store shared price lists, tables, and other documentation. Part of my job was to keep these data files updated with info on a daily basis.
The problem with trying to edit these files was that everyone logged in on the network had access to them and could change them arbitrarily. Or they could even just inadvertently lock the files if they left them open on their PCs. There was no control or change management.
I decided to keep the 'canonical' versions of the files on my PC at work and use Unison to sync them over to the shared network versions of the files once a day. Unison would instantly tell me if anyone other than me had changed the files, and I could investigate further. It was a huge relief knowing that I had proper control over those files.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Unison synchronizes files to files, but for a Dropbox-like system you really want deduplication for space savings (i.e. server-side storage is a bunch of pointers to content-addressed blocks.) > - in general, it's not clear to me that the client is really the hard part of Dropbox. Note e.g. the part where Dropbox now runs its own data centers for cost reasons. The whole point of Unison is that you do not need a s…
Erm, with pairwise syncing you still want a "server". I've used unison as my primarily file syncing for a decade, and trying to maintain a spanning tree among partially-available nodes/disks is a pain in the ass. And creating loops means you can't rely on file deletions. I agree it doesn't have to be a corporate-owned, or even corporate-snoopable "cloud" server, and if this is your goal then unison will work well. Al…
There are multiple dedup utilities. I use fdupes, which can not only list but also remove or replace duplicates with hardlinks.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, I really like Lisp and especially Scheme. Don't get me wrong. I just think that a lot of projects suffer from being written in a language with a small community or even, at the time of conception, a thriving yet fleeting community (Perl, Ruby, etc).
Unison seems to be maintained, there just isn't much to maintain. Perhaps being in C would attract a huge community to make up for the increased work required, or perhaps that wouldn't be sustainable and we're better off with projects that can better "hibernate". Not C but not super powerful seems like the worst of both worlds.
Unison and Wings 3D are both projects I wanted to make changes to when I was using them. Downloaded the source code for both, spent a day or so reading and fiddling and got bored. I actually like learning new languages, but I don’t have the capacity to learn a new language, build system, tooling, style & formatting, install the right Emacs mode, and so on just to scratch a little itch.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to use it daily to sync projects, music, and documents between computers too. It was really nice once I got it configured to my liking. I would sync my work computer to a external hard drive and the external drive to my home computer, thus creating a very powerful sneakernet and an implicit backup on the external. I reluctantly installed Dropbox one day after forgetting my external drive at home. Honestly, tha…
Sorry, I'm probably missing something obvious (and am asking out of genuine curiosity here), but why didn't you go back to using Unison? And what are you using now that you quit Dropbox?
Dropbox ended up be an institutional requirement where I was working. Now I just let iCloud do it’s thing. It isn’t great, but it is less buggy than Dropbox.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#70I use Unison every day to synchronize my work computer and my home computer, using an USB thumb drive as the intermediary. The thing I like the most about this arrangement is that I don't need a direct SSH between home and work, that there is no cloud service involved, and that the GUI lets me double check what files are going to be written to/from the usb drive before it synchronizes. There is one issue that I have…
> Is there a way to make my arrangement more robust so that I can sync files through and USB drive, without needing to use the same numeric user id in all my computers? $ chown -Rf ufo.users /media/usbdrive && unison
Would I need `sudo` for this chown command?