I did run into a problem synchronizing files between platforms. One of my goals in all of this was to synchronize my firefox profile. When I first set it up, I created the profile on OS X and synchronized it to Windows. I noticed Unison failing to synchronize quite a few files in my internet cache because the filenames were invalid in Windows.

So, to answer your question–Unison appears to skip files that cannot be synchronized because the filename is not valid between operating systems.

I actually got around this by creating my Firefox profile in Windows. When the Windows Firefox profile was synchronized to OS X, files in my OS X cache were named with the Windows convention and because the Windows character set for file names is always valid in OS X/BSD, this worked out. Evidently there is a setting buried deep somewhere within the Firefox profile that tells it which character set to use.

I suspect that this concept can be applied to other cases as well. Try creating the files with the more restrictive filename character set in place and then synchronizing.

I hope that helps. Let me know if there are more specifics I can help with.

–jason

This is a great post — thanks for writing it up. Have you come up with a way to handle file naming differences between platforms? For example, “:” is a legal character on Unix but represents a drive delimiter on Windows — how does Unison handle that when trying to sync?

Ramon