Since I started my document-scanning project, I’ve been backing the scanned data up to my local file server, manually at first, and then with Xcopy.  That lead to a few problems when documents would get moved, so I started purging the backup copy each time and doing a full copy instead.  That worked fine (gigabit Ethernet and all), but it seemed silly;

I’d looked at Rsync or whatever, but those mostly ran from the Linux side (which didn’t make sense, because it wouldn’t know if the scanner PC was turned on or not.  James, from the Omaha Maker Group, recommended last night that I check out  Unison.  At its most basic level, Unison is a lot like Xcopy, except that it’s smart enough to do full synchronization, and even diff and combine files (probably mostly TXT files, I didn’t try that).  I downloaded just the text version (for Windows); The GUI version required GTK+, and I didn’t feel like installing that.  I ran the sync once, without the -batch flag, and now run it on a schedule like so:

unison <path to local folder> <path to file server> -auto -batch

I’m not using most of the really cool stuff (like it working over SSH, or actually merging or providing diffs of files), but even for my fairly basic needs, it was quick to set up and easy to operate.

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Products, Technology by Kevin