Background
As a former Novell employee there is one software I really miss and that is iFolder. It is an excellent file syncronization software. You configure iFolder where your local iFolder files are located and what server to syncronize against. Do a sync and now they are avilable at any iFolder instance if you sync against the same server. It works almost magical. You can have several machines where you create files, sync them. After that go to a fresh machine do a iFolder sync and volá there is the files.
According to Novell iFolder is OpenSourced but the installation is horrible on any other plattform then SuSE.
Solution
After some investigation I finally stumbled on Unison. Unison works on Unix like operating system like, Linux, BSD, OS X and also on Windows. It is in the Ubuntu repository and RHEL rpm package can be found here.
Simple example
Syncronize one directory testunison containing two files
peter@peter-laptop:~$ unison -ui text -contactquietly testunison ssh://zelda/testunison
peter@zelda's password:
Looking for changes
Waiting for changes from server
Reconciling changes
local zelda.mynet
new file —-> a [f]
new file —-> b [f]
Proceed with propagating updates? [] y
Propagating updates
UNISON 2.27.57 started propagating changes at 21:56:43 on 27 Aug 2009
[BGN] Copying a from /home/peter/testunison to //zelda.mynet//home/peter/testunison
[BGN] Copying b from /home/peter/testunison to //zelda.mynet//home/peter/testunison
[END] Copying a
[END] Copying b
UNISON 2.27.57 finished propagating changes at 21:56:43 on 27 Aug 2009
Saving synchronizer state
Synchronization complete (2 items transferred, 0 skipped, 0 failures)
Links
- Unison homepage: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
- Unison tutorial
