Comments on: Unison - file synchronization tool

By: Jan Lindh

Jan Lindh — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:16:27 +0000

Regarding unison and special characters like åäö:

Well this is slightly outside of ubuntu, but about half a year ago I set up my wifes windows PC to sync against my debian etch server. Using a minimum of cygwin with unison was the solution. Fixing so unison handled filenames with swedish characters wasn’t easy, but at last I found a way.

…problem is - I can’t remember how I did it!

The only thing that rings my mind is that this was a cygwin problem. And the fix could have been changing the Cygwin.bat file to:

—————–Cygwin.bat beginning————-
@echo off

chdir C:\cygwin\bin

set CYGWIN=tty

bash –login -i

—————–Cygwin.bat end————-

How the original looked like I can’t remember.

Not much of an answer, but at least something…

Good Luck!

By: Matt Canalegrande

Matt Canalegrande — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:38:17 +0000

I am simply stuck with
Received unexpected header from the server: expected "Unison 2.27\n" but received "Unison 2.13\n00000000", which differs at "Unison 2.1".
Server is ubuntu hardy 64
Linux ice 2.6.24-19-server #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 18:43:06 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
and client is hardy 32
Linux can 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Mon Aug 25 17:32:09 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

How can I proceed to get these two synced?

By: stat

stat — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:38:30 +0000

I have played with unison but to me you are sacrificing a lot to have a gui interface. Rsync is your friend. I find it does the job faster, better and with less issues. The issue with unison about not working with differing builds drives me bats. I want a sync tool that is robust and just works. I don’t want to have to waste time trying to interpret why it might have failed. It is hard enough for me to have the discipline to do an actual sync.

By: KK

KK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:21:38 +0000

Hi,

After sync, the copied file has the current date & time, is there any way or any other application can maintained the copied/synced file original modified date & time ?

thanks

By: mdlr

mdlr — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:44:33 +0000

It does take forever to hash large files. There are command line options like -fastcheck which look like they might help but they don’t appear to. I’m looking for a good way of syncing two directories with v large files in. All I want is filename and modified dates comparing. Any ideas?

By: mastapat11

mastapat11 — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 08:42:06 +0000

@Crazy:

Your suspicions of the hashing latency for large directories are justified.
i tried to sync two 400Gb+ folders and it took Unison 25hrs+ to complete the initial comparison and that doesn’t factor in the time to do the actual trans/changes!!! and the folders were 95% similar to begin with!

i was using it for a folder on Ubuntu client against folder on an ubuntu server over nfs.
the same thing using Synctoy on windows client against folder on ubuntu server over samba takes 5-10m.

i haven’t tried it again yet to see if it’s reduced and is just that long only for initial hash (too afraid).

By: Crazy

Crazy — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:16:11 +0000

Watch out when using unison on windows, althou the latest releases have improved, it used to cause allot of bluescreens and 0 byte files.

What also might be a problem using unison is when you sync your directory, and it’s large, that it hashes each file to see if there are changes. If it’s only 100mb or something then it’s fine, but don’t know what result it gives running it on a directory several GB large.

For using it on windows and if you want a GUI I recommend making your own GUI(that does only what you need it to do). Saves you the trouble of making profiles etc.

Hmm, after reading my post again it sounds a little negavive. Unison does the job pretty good, so by no means it’s a bad program. Just make sure you test it enough before using it on critical data

By: Peter Lau

Peter Lau — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:49:06 +0000

Do you know that Unison does not support Unicode (UTF8) ?

If your file or directory name are Unicode with none English characters , you will see the problem.

It has been described in the Unison web site.

Use it with careful on your locale setting.

By: jose

jose — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:21:28 +0000

I like Unison and use it from time to time. But my biggest issue is that files on a partition that I use to share data between Vista and Ubuntu always have different permissions. In particular, they look like executables when I list them in Ubuntu. Unison therefore offers to propagate changed even if the files are otherwise identical. In the Unison gui I see no option to ignore file permissions.

By: ikaruga

ikaruga — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:46:38 +0000

@Scott@ I’ve been using unison for a while now and it’s awesome. (It’s awesome because I make changes on both computers and that would throw off rsync.) It’s dead simple to setup. unison syncs two folders. Exclusions are done via “-ignore ‘Path /path’ and -’ignore ‘Name ‘. I dunno about file transfer limits though, although it might be possible.