While reading through one of my regular industry papers I

came across the file synchronisation tool Unison.  Unison, created by Benjamin Pierce of the University of Pennsylvania is a great tool for synchronising

two copies of a directory structure in different locations, there is a massive

advantage held over simple tools like rsync which is the ability to update

changes made to both structures (so long as there is no conflict).

We have an ongoing CRM project which requires extensive data

synchronisation over many sites, this has proven to be a bit of a nightmare with

complex scripting based around rsync.  It

will be interesting to see if Unison can simplify the process.