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I have all my homework archived in a single folder on my home PC (mac), and I have that folder mirrored on my personal account at university (linux). I'd like to keep those folders in sync, and I'm looking for alternative ways to do that. Main difficulty: I'm working in the folder both at home and at university (but fortunately never simultaneously).

Currently, the folder is also mirrored on my VPS (linux), to which my home PC rsync's all the changes every hour with a cron job. I have a script in my home folder at university that can rsync all changes down from the VPS to the university system (it's an NFS to a central server) if I invoke it, and another that rsync's any changes up to the VPS. The download script is also on my home PC for fetching changes made while at university.

The scripts have a --delete flag that it just passes on to rsync, that I can use if I deleted files at some point (otherwise rsync never deletes files, for very good reasons). Using this system to synchronise all my files between home and university works pretty well, but it's a pain to always have to manually invoke rsync from university (I could have it run automatically, but I'd still have to download changes, and I'm worried about conflicts on my VPS, so I'd rather only have one endpoint auto-sync my changes).

I've thought about using git for this, having my VPS act as a git server. This would solve any divergence issues I have (I lost a few files lately due to excessive use of --delete), but I'm not sure git will be able to handle a ~600MB repo with 3000+ files. (Don't ask.) Are there any other methods/tools for doing this effectively? Is it worth my time to write a FUSE filesystem that just passes through to the native filesystem, but logs changes on the way (and maybe syncs everything up in a magical way...)?

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As you appear to have a VPS which would allow you to run a server, look at OwnCloud and NextCloud - they provide distributed backups and syncing similar to drop-box, but using your own hardware.

There are clients for Windows, Linux, Android, Mac and no doubt other OS's as well.

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On my own machines, I've been using Syncthing. If you're willing to use a Web GUI for configuration, it's a pretty decent cross-platform solution. I've got it set up to sync files between my laptop (with both Linux and Windows partitions), my phone, and a couple of headless servers. Admittedly, I've never tested it with large numbers of files, but it's worked well for my setup.

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  • Thanks, didn't know about that! I gather that by default, Syncthing rescans the folder once in a while. That's going to be slow if there are lots of files and the file system is an NFS... syncthing-inotify looks interesting though.
    – tomsmeding
    Commented May 18, 2017 at 20:49
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I use Google Drive.

They give 15 GB for free, and it is easily accessable from any machines whether Windows or Android or Linux.

You can install a desktop app to access it easily.

Alternatively, you can login to http://drive.google/com from any computer no matter where you are.

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