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Milano
Asked: 2018-12-30 03:10:08 +0800 CST

Unison - how to make it sync automatically (bidirectional)

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I have a folder music on my HDD and folder Music in external HDD. I want these 2 folders to be synced (ie if I add/remove/edit something in one folder, the changes immediately reflects in another).

I think that Unison could do this but I'm struggling setting Unison to sync automatically. For now, I have to manually sync.

I've read that repeat=watch should do the thing but I can't set it.

enter image description here

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As you can see the value "watch" hasn't been saved.

I tried nano ~/.unison/Music\ HDD\ EXT\ HDD.prf and manually set repeat = watch and tried to put some file into one folder but it didn't copied it into another.

Do you have any ideas?

sync unison 18.04

1 Answers

  1. The root of your problem here is a misunderstanding of what the graphical interface can do. You'll see in your screenshot that the repeat option is only for the text interface only. That is because the graphical interface can only run unison once when you click GO.

    To get the behavior you want, you'll need to use the text (command line) interface. Since you've put repeat=watch in your profile, you'll just need to open up a terminal and run Unison from the command line with that profile: 

    unison Music\ HDD\ EXT\ HDD &

    I would recommend a shorter profile name than Music\ HDD\ EXT\ HDD ;) . The & is there to run Unison in the background (detached from that particular terminal). Then, since it looks like you want to run Unison very automatically, checkout this post on how to run that Unison command automatically when you login.

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