Effortlessly Synchronize Two Big Folders with Unison, Even When You Change a Parent Folder Name

To synchronize two large folders (around 1 TB of files) on separate computers using Unison, follow these steps:

1. Install Unison on both computers. You can download it from Unison's official website.

2. Open a terminal on both computers.

3. Navigate to the parent folder you want to synchronize on both computers.

4. Run the following command on both computers:

unison -root=path/to/parent/folder user@remote_computer:path/to/remote/parent/folder -auto -ignorecase -nodaemon -batch

Replace path/to/parent/folder with the path to the parent folder on the local computer, user@remote_computer with the username and hostname of the remote computer, and path/to/remote/parent/folder with the path to the parent folder on the remote computer.

5. The -auto option will automatically start the synchronization process when the command is run.

6. The -ignorecase option will ignore case differences when comparing file names.

7. The -nodaemon option prevents Unison from starting the daemon, which is not necessary when running in batch mode.

8. The -batch option tells Unison to run in batch mode, which is useful for automating the synchronization process.

9. If you need to change the name of the parent folder on one of the computers, you can do so after running the Unison command. Unison will still synchronize the files correctly, as long as the file paths remain the same.

Here's an example of how the command might look:

unison -root=/local/parent_folder user@remote_computer:/remote/parent_folder -auto -ignorecase -nodaemon -batch

Remember to replace /local/parent_folder and /remote/parent_folder with the actual paths to your parent folders.

After running the command, Unison will synchronize the files between the two computers. If there are any changes to the files, Unison will update them accordingly.

For more information, you can refer to the Unison manual.

References

• Unison Manual. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/manual/
• Unison Downloads. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/downloads/