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Unison

Posted Jan 14, 05:16 PM in Apple by Scott Conley

Something worth blogging about, cracking the seal on the textpattern install after lo these many months since iPhone..

I’ve been busy configuring my (no longer hot) new MacPro to synchronize files with my laptop. This has been generating ongoing fussiness in my mind since repeated applications of rsync have let me down. Basically with the uni-directional copying behavior in rsync, I was unable to delete anything (it would be recopied with the next ‘sync’ as rsync is really a stateless application).

This has been a focus for me lately as I’ve been trying to make a nice comfortable home for Apple’s new ultra-portable laptop (whenever it would be released, which was today). Further, predicting the inclusion of a Solid-State Hard Drive into the new hardware, I have long been figuring on its probable 64GB capacity. Managing stuff going onto-and-off-of the laptop is going to be a big priority.

I don’t usually blog about technical interests (ok ok I don’t usually blog at all) but I have found some real joy in this bi-directional command-line-friendly application called Unison .

I’ve got Apple’s launchd configured to spin off Unison invocations every hour, synchronizing the ‘volatile’ areas of my Documents tree: client notes, work documents, presentations, and the like.

To this I’ve added a nightly sync of some of the less-traveled paths, like certain ~/Library areas, pieces of /usr, and the larger items in /Downloads.

Finally, the tricky one has been getting iTunes mirrored (also nightly) with source (mp3 and mp4) files coming from one of the larger drives on the MacPro, and iTunes Library files coming from my regular ~/Music path.

What’s awesome about this is that Unison, like rsync, operates over an SSH remote shell, basically yielding my ideal laptop data scenario: automatic, wireless and secure periodic synchronization from anywhere I’ve got wireless.

Bonus question: I’m forwarding a non-standard port for ssh traffic from our router to my MacPro. Any guesses?

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