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Unison File Synchronizer

cis.upenn.edu

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Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#71

Post by [deleted] »

h1d wrote: post #63
rsync wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

[deleted]

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#72

Post by xenoscopic »

I've been working on a spiritual successor to Unison for a few years called Mutagen [1]. It aims to provide more flexible synchronization and tighter integration with filesystem watching, enabling ~real-time remote editing with your local editor of choice. It also adds SSH-style network forwarding, so you can forward network traffic to/from remote systems to access remote applications without exposing ports. It currently supports SSH and Docker containers, but additional transports are coming.

I'd be really happy to receive feedback if you have a chance to try it out!

[1] https://github.com/mutagen-io/mutagen

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#74

Post by ufo »

rwmj wrote: post #10
avhception wrote: post #4

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. I've donated multiple times over the years.

I'm a maintainer of the Unison package in Fedora and I'd love to know which version(s) of Unison you use day to day. In Fedora (and I think this applies in Debian too) we have to maintain 3 versions because Unison isn't interoperable across minor releases. For this reason we package 2.13, 2.27 and 2.40, and I think there is discussion about packaging the latest release too. Keeping these ancient (esp 2.13) versions g…

Thank you for your work! I use Unison on Fedora almost every day. The version is 2.40, which IIRC is the default you get from "dnf install unison".

My use-case is that I run Unison on two computers running Fedora, to implement a form of "sneakernet" file sync. Work computer usb thumb drive home computer.

I wasn't aware that the exact version of Unison was so important. Will start paying attention to that.

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#75

Post by sooheon »

xenoscopic wrote: post #72

I've been working on a spiritual successor to Unison for a few years called Mutagen [1]. It aims to provide more flexible synchronization and tighter integration with filesystem watching, enabling ~real-time remote editing with your local editor of choice. It also adds SSH-style network forwarding, so you can forward network traffic to/from remote systems to access remote applications without exposing ports. It curre…

Haven't dug into it yet, but quick Q: does this allow the use case of using a local IDE to interactively develop/run code against a docker environment running in a remote server? (so two "jumps")

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#76

Post by jacobu9 »

sooheon wrote: post #75
xenoscopic wrote: post #72

I've been working on a spiritual successor to Unison for a few years called Mutagen [1]. It aims to provide more flexible synchronization and tighter integration with filesystem watching, enabling ~real-time remote editing with your local editor of choice. It also adds SSH-style network forwarding, so you can forward network traffic to/from remote systems to access remote applications without exposing ports. It curre…

Haven't dug into it yet, but quick Q: does this allow the use case of using a local IDE to interactively develop/run code against a docker environment running in a remote server? (so two "jumps")

That's actually one of the primary use cases at the moment. The way Mutagen works with Docker is by using `docker cp` to inject one of its "agent" binaries into the container and then communicating with that binary over `docker exec`.

You can also orchestrate your setup a bit (e.g. to work with Docker Compose) using Mutagen's new orchestration infrastructure. You can find an example of this at the bottom of the Mutagen homepage: https://mutagen.io

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#77

Post by logandk »

Unison is great for keeping multiple machines in sync. I eventually switched to Dropbox for reasons I don't recall, but it might be a good time to reconsider. Also, I'd forgotten, but apparently I even made a (poor) attempt at writing a Unison UI of OS X, some 11 years ago... https://github.com/logandk/autoson

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#78

Post by devnulloverflow »

rsync wrote: post #33
avhception wrote: post #4

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. 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…

I only just found out about borg and restic, but the sites I looked at both mention "backup" prominently. And that makes sense. If I ever sign up for rsync.net, it will be so I can store long term backups of my stuff, which I might add to incrementally, but never really change.

But Unison is for syncing, which means maintaining eventually consistent replicas of a changing directory tree (up to some pragmatic exceptions and manual tweaks). The whole point of Unison is to turn multiple devices into a single failure domain, which requires a separate system for storing safe backups.

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#79

Post by jwr »

stavros wrote: post #65
comex wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similarly here. Very happy with syncthing.

Re: Unison File Synchronizer

#80

Post by xenadu02 »

rgovostes wrote: post #2

From the changelog: > Further improvements to the OS X GUI (thanks to Alan Schmitt and Craig Federighi). Here are Craig's commits: - https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/commit/48f8e1b27edbe2df... - https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/commit/6645d1793ce843f6... Around the same time, Dave Abrahams, now of Apple's Swift team, makes an appearance on the unison-hackers mailing list.

The license was still GPLv2 back then.
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