Unison File Synchronizer

Re:Unison File Synchronizer by aidenn0 on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @02:37PM (#39293186)

I haven't used Unison in a while, so maybe this isn't true anymore, but what always ended being the hangup for me was that both sides needed to use exactly the same version of Unison (IIRC at least down to the minor version number).

This ends up being a hassle unless you are using exactly the same OS on both sides, since you need to either have the right version in ports/apt/pacman/whatever or manage the Unison builds yourself.

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by lizknope on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @02:55PM (#39293412)

If you look at the release notes you can see that some versions say they are protocol compatible with prior X.Y version release

https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases

But I have seen problems when one version was far ahead of the other

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by jxy on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @02:52PM (#39293378)

It's been relaxed a bit. I have a few end points and currently they are on two different versions.

> Unison 2.53.3 (ocaml 4.12.1): Contacting server...

> Unison 2.51.5 (ocaml 4.14.0): Contacting server...

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by mcguire on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @03:06PM (#39293570)

This was the reason I've mostly stopped using it. Still the best file sync tool I have seen.

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by Filligree on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @02:46PM (#39293291)

You might like Restic as an alternative. It's a bit higher performance, and there's no server component needed.

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by shoo on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @05:52PM (#39295424)

i've used both restic and unison, they're both good tools but they're focused on different jobs, they're not really comparable.

restic is specialised for backups and offers uni-directional backup and uni-directional restore from backup.

unison implements bi-directional sync.

if you don't want bi-directional sync and don't want specialised backup support, rsync will get the job done.

if you want bi-directional sync (unifying changes made on both sides), that's something that neither rsync nor restic can handle.

tangentially, re: using restic for offsite backups, one storage provider that pairs quite nicely with restic is rsync.net -- they have a lower-rate pricing offer specifically for use with restic (by default rsync.net filesystems have ZFS snapshots available, they disable ZFS snapshots for these "restic accounts" -- the restic application is then responsible for managing backup snapshots, not the filesystem).

https://www.rsync.net/products/restic.html

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Re:Unison File Synchronizer by perryh2 on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @02:42PM (#39293245)

I notice the same issue with rsync between different systems.

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