unison VS sshfs

If you look at the release notes you can see that some versions say they are protocol compatible with prior X.Y version release

https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases

You might want to try Unison: https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison

I highly recommend Unison (https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison)

It allows you to sync between 2 machines (bi-directional) over TCP or SSH.

Note that TCP way is not encrypted, you may use wireguard as transport layer encryption for that purpose...

You can use an external application to copy if file size is larger than an arbitrary number. (Eg: use rsync for files > 1gb)

The iOS app only syncs via iCloud or Obsidian Sync. I was in a similar situation (wanted to sync to Linux PCs and iPhone without paying for Sync), but I do have one always on Mac, so I set up a script that runs every minute, syncing my vault on iCloud with an identical vault on Synology Drive. My script basically just runs Unison once every few minutes to keep the two vaults in sync.

Unison is another alternative. I use it to synchronize my music with a Samba share and an usb stick, works great.

Unison

I've tested many file synchronization. I rely via scripts on Unison, originally authored by the computer scientist Benjamin Pierce, and now decades of tweaking by a strong open source community.

https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison

I'd love to see Darke Files get everything right that Unison gets right, that nearly all commercial projects get wrong, through a blend of arrogance and ignorance:

* Meta data. It takes a lot to insure that two copies of a MacOS file appear identical to a user. There used to be a test suite on the web that embarrassed everybody.

* Atomic folders such as ".git" or an application bundle. A prototypical example is a MacOS disk image, supported by a folder of many small files. This helps minimize incremental backup and transfer. Unison lets you specify the conflict resolution at the folder level, all-or-nothing decide which copy or fix it.

* Symbolic links. This is wildly complicated by users, sure they're right, who want special handling to hack features into sync software that isn't there. A symbolic link is just a file, with correct use the responsibility of the user. You wouldn't want sync software stopping to view your porn, right? They're just files, not the sync software's business.

I use Dropbox for various purposes because I need to, but they bungle more of this than one would expect. For example, a typical MacOS application bundle can have internal symbolic links a typical user never notices, pointing the "current" version of resources to a versioned folder. Last I checked, Dropbox expands the symbolic link into a redundant copy, wasting space without kneecapping the app.

One could go on...

I've been using Unison [1] to sync two and more computers for years. I can't recommend it enough.

[1]: https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison

> It's replaced sshfs for some cases.

I'd been using sshfs for some years until I learned that rclone can mount remotes to the file system, and I've been using that happily since then.

https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/

> at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues

https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs#development-status

Interesting, I alaways assumed sshfs was part of OpenSSH, learn something new every day.

Also, looks like sshfs used in Slackware is abandoned.

https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

A quote from the link, I wonder if this project will be the 'one':

>If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact [email protected] and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork.

I also wonder if it was abandoned due to the RHEL re-orgs like what happened to bluetooth.

SSHFS offers a solution for connecting to SSH servers through a network filesystem client. Enables users to seamlessly mount remote filesystems, without any server-side requirements. Underknowledge appreciates it "for mounting remote machines."

However, my setup relies on me using sshfs to "mount" a remote directory (which houses the media that jellyfin uses). For jellyfin to have access to this directory, it has to run the command under its user (based on sshfs manpages).

So I need to work with remote files and wondered how people here go about that. I've looked at sshfs, which seems the most obvious way to go and presumably would work fine (?), but it is an archived project; and tried distant.nvim, but that didn't click too well.

As far as I am aware, sshfs is no longer actively maintained.

After getting a bit discouraged since the easy solution failed, I ended up discovering that you can mount a remote filesystem over ssh using sshfs.