syncing two pcs

[David Brown]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 10:08:36AM -0400, Donald Allen wrote:

>In my situation, there's no USB drive, except for backup. When I'm
>switch from computer A to computer B, I rsync from A to B.

This is the main advantage of unison over rsync, it remembers which
direction you need to sync in.  If you do end up editing both, it
presents you with a choice as to which one you want to use.  I've done
this occasionally, and usually, I can just pick the correct one, and
re-enter a few transactions.  Sometimes, I'm even lucky enough for
them to be independent, and I can just replay the extra log file.

I did end up writing a small script to put the gnucash data file into
git instead of all of the backup files.  I store them uncompressed,
and with git's delta compression, so far storing 256 copyies of my
data file (which is about 4.5MB now) takes less space than 2
compressed copies of the data.

Also, keeping the gnucash data file uncompressed makes programs like
rsync and unison _much_ faster.  Once it's compressed, the data is
pretty much completely different, whereas left uncompressed, rsync's
algorithm can figure out deltas to transfer.

David