This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at Unison, a cross-platform file-synchronization tool. There’s both a terminal-based interface, and a graphical interface using GTK+.
The software offers two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then made up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.