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Electrifyings
Asked: 2012-01-23 05:43:46 +0800 CST

SyncToy like application

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Any Synctoy like software that supports scheduling and multiple folders selection? I need to synchronize One folder which consists of subfolders from multiple locations. Also changes should be 2 way, meaning file deleted from one location should be deleted in other and should not follow source and destination analogy of rsync.

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3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Pratik is not 100 % correct; Unison does have a nice GUI: Unison GUI

    It can be helpful in getting you started.

    However, it is also possible to run from the command line, which makes it easy to put in a cron job, so that you can schedule it to run every 15 minutes or whatever you want. You'll typically create a profile with a certain name, you can do this in the GUI, but then you can run that profile from the commandline like

    unison -batch name_of_your_profile

    This is useful since you can then make a cronjob out of it. Type crontab -e, then paste in the line

    */15 * * * *      /usr/bin/unison -batch name_of_your_profile   &> /tmp/unison-cron.log

    and exit the editor. Your unison command will now run every 15 minutes, and output any errors to the file /tmp/unison-cron.log.

    Actually, it seems like there's even a GUI for cron, Gnome Schedule(friendly intro to it here). Never tried it, but I guess it makes running Unison from cron even more user-friendly …

    See also the Ubuntu wiki page on Unison.

    Unison is quite powerful, I've used it for a long time to sync stuff between two laptops, a desktop and a remote server … It's quite good at ensuring you get the newest and correct content, and if there's a conflict it's easy to merge. It's not a backup tool, though; if you delete everything on one end, you'll find it deleted on the other end too ;-)

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  2. Lots of options... Many use rsync, as described here: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/backup

    I like the graphical version Grsync as described here: http://www.linuxloop.com/2009/04/21/how-to-pain-free-backups-with-grsync-and-gnome-schedule/

    Make sure to read the comments regarding scheduling...

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  3. Have you tried unison and cron together? unison does the two way syncing. cron does the scheduling. These are command line tools, not GUI applications.

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