#Unison or freefilesync mac os x#
#Unison or freefilesync full#
#Unison or freefilesync windows#

It doesn't need the gnome libraries to run, but can of course run under gnome pretty fine. It uses the gtk libraries and can work under the gnome desktop.

#Unison or freefilesync mac os x#

It works on linux, solaris, windows, mac os x and maemo. Grsync is a rsync gui, a graphical user interface for the rsync file synchronization and backup tool.

#Unison or freefilesync full#

* Unison is free full source code is available under the GNU Public License. * Unison has a clear and precise specification. It is careful to leave the replicas and its own private structures in a sensible state at all times, even in case of abnormal termination or communication failures. Transfers of small updates to large files are optimized using a compression protocol similar to rsync. It is careful with network bandwidth, and runs well over slow links such as PPP connections. * Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the internet, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling over an encrypted ssh connection. * Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program: there is no need to modify the kernel or to have superuser privileges on either host. Conflicting updates are detected and displayed. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. * Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure.

#Unison or freefilesync windows#

Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example. * Unison runs on both Windows and many flavors of Unix (Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc.) systems. However, there are several points where it differs: Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).

It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. By all accounts SyncThing is quite similar to it.Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. (A thorough blog post would include an investigation of Resilio, formely BitTorrent Sync. Keep two folders in sync, that’s all I want. It’s simpler and less featurful than DropBox/NextCloud/ownCloud, which is exactly what I want. Development started late 2013.Īll in all I’m quite impressed with SyncThing. He seems super nice and helpful on the community forum answering lots of questions. He also has a consulting business called Kastelo. I took a quick look at GitHub and the primary author is Jakob Borg, aka calmh. It even does something reasonable for conflicts. I haven’t stressed the sync algorithm too hard but it seems to be working for me. (They also have a relay network for cases where two machines are so firewalled they can’t connect to each other. You can manually configure via IP addresses if you want. It’s quite neat but I’d rather not be quite so promiscuous so I turned it off. I mentioned way above machines have names how do you find a machine on the Internet given its name? There’s some global discovery protocol built under the hood, a peer to peer network sharing names. I also made things more complicated than necessary by disabling machine discovery. There’s something called an “introducer” where one machine will offer a list of folders to the other machine, but I either don’t understand it or broke it somehow. For every new machine I add to my sync cluster I had to go through each folder and share it. I may have made things complicated myself but the folder setup seems complicated. Once the machines are talking to each other you then set up synchronizing folders. No visible passwords, but presumably some public key crypto under the hood. A dialog pops up on machine 1 then to authorize the connection. Every machine has a name and you can just tell machine 2 “sync with machine 1”. Getting two machines to sync is a little weird. That publishes a nice Web UI on port 8384, also an application specific socket on port 22000. Every machine that wants to sync a folder runs the SyncThing binary in the background. But it’s built for network synchronizing. (More complicated than rsync, since it maintains state between synchronization runs). In that way it’s a lot like Unison, or FreeFileSync. NextCloud has a full database and users and passwords and APIs and stuff. So I gave SyncThing a try and it’s much more to my liking. After getting NextCloud set up I was uncomfortable with how complicated it was.