December 8th, 2007
I’ve successfully replaced almost every application I had in windows with alternative one available in Linux. Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Pidgin, gEdit, GIMP, GwGet, KMyMoney, Amarok, VLC media player and Brasero are installed on my system and they have all features I need. There is only one application I don’t have suitable replacement for: SyncBack.
Syncback is freeware application for Windows useful for keeping content of some folder synchronized. I used it to backup all my documents from disk to disk in case of hardware failure. It is really simple: choose a source and destination folder to keep synchronized, make a schedule and your data will be regularly duplicated with only modified documents actually transferred.
On Ubuntu I couldn’t find any application to replace simple but powerful Syncback. In this case one of a major Linux weaknesses surfaced: lack of general purpose applications. Some programs are too feature bloated and some are too specialized.
I needed some exercise in Python, high level scripting language, so I decided my first project will be PySync: the simple synchronizer written in Python. Although I’m writing it to solve my own problem I’ll try to make it usable for others.