Bidirectional backup solution with unison on windows – Part 1
After much research into available backup solutions for windows I could not find one that could do what I wanted (essentially sync files and folders across machines and have changes replicated in all directions so if a change occurred on machine 1 and another on machine 2 both changes would be reflected in both machines instead of one change overwriting the other in a traditional one directional backup solutions). A popular service which serves this purpose is Dropbox but it runs on the cloud and that’s enough for you to look the other way. I’m not a fan of the cloud and neither should you, keep your files safe locally and encrypted.
A linux based command line utility called rsync was the first milestone in finding a solution in terms of efficiency as it is extremely fast in replicating updates across however the problem was this was also one directional.
The final solution came when I discovered a tool called unison which is based on rsync but provides this bidirectional functionality. Unison and rsync are both unix based tool so we will use cygwin on windows to use them.