Unison-Indicator

Install Unison in your PC

We choose version 2.48.3, which is stable and is the one that comes in Ubuntu.

Version 2.48.15v3 fixes a compilation problem!

We need to download the unison-fsmonitor or compile it!

Get passwordless SSH access with key to your server

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]"
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa user@host

If your server is a Raspberry Pi or another ARM-based computer...

Install Unison and unison-fsmonitor in Raspberry pi

Unless you want a different version, you can just download my binaries to your raspberry pi:

wget ... # To ~/bin, which should be in the path

Otherwise, you can compile it yourself with the following commands:

# Install compiler
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ocaml build-essential

# Get sources and compile them
wget https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/archive/v2.48.15v3.tar.gz
tar xf v2.48.15v3.tar.gz
cd unison-2.48.15v3
make UISTYLE=text
# It may fail with an error like "/bin/sh: 2: etags: not found",
# but the binary is compiled successfully

# Install
mv src/unison ~/bin/
mv src/unison-fsmonitor ~/bin/

Configure your unison profile in your PC

root = ...    # Source of data
root = ...    # Where to sync
...           # Paths
batch = true

N backups of your files

• Backups -> explain where to find them

Test that everything works

We can now run unison:

unison victor
...

And we see what it did.

Get the Unison-Indicator and add it to run at Startup

I developed a Dropbox-like indicator (200 lines of Python, find it in github).

[GIF with the indicator]

We can add it at startup and Unison will always run.

Sync when hard drive plugins

Apart from the online sync/backup of my files, I find it very convenient to have a hard drive dedicated to be an offline backup of my files.

I configured a Systemd service to run Unison-indicator agains this hard drive whenever it is plugged in. This way it syncs and I see it in the indicator at the same time:

[Init]
...