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Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the internet, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling over an encrypted ssh connection.Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program: there is no need to modify the kernel or to have superuser privileges on either host.Conflicting updates are detected and displayed. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. It provides fast incremental file transfer by transferring only the differences between the source and the destination. Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure. rsync is a fast and versatile command-line utility for synchronizing files and directories between two locations over a remote shell, or from/to a remote Rsync daemon.Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example. Unison runs on both Windows and many flavors of Unix (Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc.) systems.However, there are several points where it differs:
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Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages ( CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems ( Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities ( rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers ( Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Unison is a file-synchronization tool for OSX, Unix, and Windows. Note: The Unison project is now hosted on GitHub (here's a link).
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