Ubuntu – SyncToy like application

software-recommendationsync

Any Synctoy like software that supports scheduling and multiple folders selection? I need to synchronize One folder which consists of subfolders from multiple locations. Also changes should be 2 way, meaning file deleted from one location should be deleted in other and should not follow source and destination analogy of rsync.

Best Answer

Pratik is not 100 % correct; Unison does have a nice GUI: Unison GUI

It can be helpful in getting you started.

However, it is also possible to run from the command line, which makes it easy to put in a cron job, so that you can schedule it to run every 15 minutes or whatever you want. You'll typically create a profile with a certain name, you can do this in the GUI, but then you can run that profile from the commandline like

unison -batch name_of_your_profile

This is useful since you can then make a cronjob out of it. Type crontab -e, then paste in the line

*/15 * * * *      /usr/bin/unison -batch name_of_your_profile   &> /tmp/unison-cron.log

and exit the editor. Your unison command will now run every 15 minutes, and output any errors to the file /tmp/unison-cron.log.

Actually, it seems like there's even a GUI for cron, Gnome Schedule(friendly intro to it here). Never tried it, but I guess it makes running Unison from cron even more user-friendly …

See also the Ubuntu wiki page on Unison.

Unison is quite powerful, I've used it for a long time to sync stuff between two laptops, a desktop and a remote server … It's quite good at ensuring you get the newest and correct content, and if there's a conflict it's easy to merge. It's not a backup tool, though; if you delete everything on one end, you'll find it deleted on the other end too ;-)

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make rsync delete files that have been deleted from the source folder

To delete files in the target, add the --delete option to your command. For example:

rsync -avh source/ dest/ --delete

Ubuntu – rsync: Sync folders, but keep extra files in target

rsync has an option called --exclude-from option which allows you to create a file containing a list of any files which you would like to exclude. You can update this file whenever you want to add a new exclusion, or remove an old one.

If you create the exclude file at /home/user/rsync_exclude the new command would be:

rsync -a --delete --exclude-from="/home/user/rsync_exclude" "${source_dir}" "${target_dir}"

When creating the exclude list file, you should put each exclusion rule on a separate line. The exclusions are relative to your source directory. If your /home/user/rsync_exclude file contained the following options:

secret_file
first_dir/subdir/*
second_dir/common_name.*

Any file or directory called secret_file in your source directory will be excluded.
Any files in ${source_dir}/first_dir/subdir will be excluded, but an empty version of subdir will be synced.
Any files in ${source_dir}/second_dir with a prefix of common_name. will be ignored. So common_name.txt, common_name.jpg etc.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make rsync delete files that have been deleted from the source folder

Ubuntu – rsync: Sync folders, but keep extra files in target

Related Question