For a while, I've been using Unison to keep my desktop and laptop in sync, and it works very well for me.

But now, I'd like to move some of my files from my ext home partition to an ntfs partition on my desktop (and leave them unchanged on my laptop).

Any ideas on the best way to do this?

I'm concerned that there won't be a sane way of keeping the permissions properly recorded on moving to ntfs, and hence, unison will see everything as changed files - not to mention seeing the symlink I'd like to put on the ext partition (to the ntfs directory) as a separate file. I don't want to change unison's handling of any other symlinks.

(Extra details that may or may not be relevant: the files in question are all in one folder, all audio files of one format or another. I want to move them to an ntfs partition with Windows XP on - because I have some old audio hardware that only works on Win XP. As a bonus, is there any way to 'mount' a directory as read-only on windows, but leave it rw on linux? I know that's a windows question really.)

Hi Mantra,

I am absolutely unfamiliar with Unison, so my comments won't touch on that.

I would check out the appropriate syntax of the rsync command to do what you want (move files to the ntfs partition, preserving / translating permissions ... ), if just copying and deleting is problematic for you (that would be my first try ...).

In Windows, to "mount" read-only, just specify the "read-only" restriction in the Properties dialog box for the parent directory you are going to keep your files in.

If this is unclear or if I've misunderstood something, please feel free to ask again.

Cheers,

Rick

NTFS is not compatible with symlinks and unison will not copy it over. Look at the documentation below, Permissions are covered too.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/....html#symlinks

As far as I know rsync would have the same problems as Unison.

With samba it is possible to have a share as read only.

2 members found this post helpful.

Hi, thanks for the replies (and sorry I didn't reply at the time, and for the late post, but thought it might be useful to put my solution here for others) - in the end I just decided the simplest solution by far was to split my unison "repository" into two, one on each filesystem. It means I have to run unison twice, with different profile files each time, but that seemed much quicker than trying to figure out the correct way to do it in one command. I've made use of unison in other circumstances, and with hindsight actually the optimum solution is probably to move the data over to the ntfs filesystem, and then do a bind mount back to its original location - I've done this with ext filesystems on different partitions and it works really well, since the bind mount is transparent to unison. Permissions aren't actually much of a problem for unison even if they change, as it still sees the file data as the same so it only wants to propagate the permissions changes across, which can be overridden.