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Asked: 2026-05-15T04:13:36+00:00

I have a folder a/ and a remote folder A/. I now run something

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I have a folder a/ and a remote folder A/.
I now run something like this on a Makefile:

get-music:
 rsync -avzru server:/media/10001/music/ /media/Incoming/music/

put-music:
 rsync -avzru /media/Incoming/music/ server:/media/10001/music/

sync-music: get-music put-music

when I make sync-music, it first gets all the diffs from server to local and then the opposite, sending all the diffs from local to server.

This works very well only if there are just updates or new files on the future. If there are deletions, it doesn’t do anything.

In rsync there is –delete and –delete-after options to help accomplish what I want but thing is, it doesn’t work on a 2-way-sync.

If I want to delete server files on a syn, when local files have been deleted, it works, but if, for some reason (explained after) I have some files that aren’t in the server but exist locally and they were deleted, I want locally to remove them and not server copied (as it happens).

Thing is I have 3 machines in context:

  1. desktop
  2. notebook
  3. home-server

So, sometimes, server will have files that were deleted with a notebook sync, for example and then, when I run a sync with my desktop (where the deleted server files still exist on) I want these files to be deleted and not to be copied again to the server.

I guess this is only possible with a database and track of operations 😛

Any simpler solutions?
Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try Unison: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

    Syntax:

    unison dirA/ dirB/

    Unison asks what to do when files are different, but you can automate the process by using the following which accepts default (nonconflicting) options:

    unison -auto dirA/ dirB/

    unison -batch dirA/ dirB/ asks no questions at all, and writes to output how many files were ignored (because they conflicted).

    Note: I am no longer using Unison (I use NextCloud, which doesn’t address the original use case). However, note that rsync is not designed for bidirectional sync, while unison is. unison may have its bugs (as any other piece of software) and its wrinkles. I am surprised it seems to be actively maintained now (last time I looked I think I thought it looked dead), but I’m not sure what’s the state nowadays. I haven’t had the need to have a two-way file synchronizer, so there may be better options, though.

    Note 2: I am now currently using Mutagen for some purposes. It still doesn’t cover the question’s use case completely, but it does implement two-way sync.

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