Bill Kearney

Keeping in sync

For anyone that runs multiple web sites you know what an adventure it can be to keep everything in sync. What copies have been uploaded where is often a real challenge. I've done some digging and come across unison.

What unison does is run a program up on your remote side controlled from a local client. It does this using ssh connections instead of clear-text ftp. It seems to work pretty well. I've tried using sitecopy to handle it. It worked pretty well for just plain ftp transfers. I ran into some difficulties getting things properly syncronized when the remote side changed to using the vsftp daemon. Don't know why but it was quite frustrating.

So unison, with it's client-side GUI option, has made it quite a bit easier.