That was very instructive, particularly the part about not catching differences in white space.
I was trying to sync two folders with music files. I had been very careless about just using one as the master. The other was on a removable drive. So I had the situation where there were some files on one and not on the other in both directions, along with a lot of duplicates. Also the structure was different. For instance, Couperin's pieces might be in a file called French Baroque on one, but in a file at the top level of the other called Couperin, as I had reorganized the files to make the structure more intuitive. And then there would be some Couperin pieces that were only in one of the folders, in both directions. It was a complete mess.
I spent forever trying to figure out how to do this and finally resorted to Unison, which seemed to work OK, though I did end up with a lot of empty directories on the new master and had to purge them by hand.
The thing I learned, which I really knew already, was to be rigorous. Have a master and a backup, and only make changes to the master. Obvious enough! It crept up on me, because at first there were very few files. But as I converted more and more CDs to flac, to use on a music player, and used the backup independently, it got out of hand.
Peter
On Mon, 23 May 2022 21:10:21 +0100 (GMT+01:00) Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk wrote:
PS: Unison, now that's a blast from the past! Used to be a heavy user but probably haven't touched it in 10 years or so.
What are you trying to sync? I use version control (generally SVN) for some things, SyncThing for others, rsync for others still - they're all great for different use cases.
Might have to dig out unison for some nostalgia though!