All of a sudden, I feel the need to have regular backups of my data (on the laptop) to a server at office and at home. I’ve never had this kind of requirement as I used to have my ad-hoc backups done manually. Now within a month I’ve so many documents/files that I need to preserve. So the thought of using ‘Oracle FileSync’ came to the mind…but hey I’ve left Oracle long time back. So the hunt for a similar FileSync program began.
From tkyte’s blog, I got reference to Unison. Since Tom has been using this tool for quite some time, I thought it would be worthwhile to evaluating from this one.
Boy ! Its not as easy as it sounds. Downloaded the utility for windows, the GTK+ one alnog with the standalone GTK+ installer. Tried a simple local dir sync and it went pretty good. I wanted to move on and sync a local folder to my remote linux server. For remote server connection, it needed a ssh client. I use PuTTY and this was no good for Unison. I could have tried the cygwin thing, but have left it for another day. Downloaded ssh-1.2.14 . Had trouble in getting this ssh work. After much digging around, it turned to be the way env variable HOME was setup. With the proper format, ssh.exe was able to connect to my linux server.
All set, I was eager to try it out now…but then…realized that you need unison even on the other side of the synchronization. Here starts the never ending story of RPMs for the perfect lib versions 🙁
Currently I need to get the ocaml installed on my RHEL3 box and then manually build the unison using it. ocaml now refuses to get installed till I get the required libtcl and libtk loaded. So testing of Unison is on hold at the moment.
