Synchronization is one of the most powerful features of Awasu, letting you keep two or more copies of Awasu running on different machines (e.g. at home and at work) in sync with each other. Not only will it keep your channel subscriptions in sync, it will also track which items you have read, all your program settings, channel favorites, filters and reports, everything!
Let's say you're leaving work on Friday afternoon (woo hoo!) and want to transfer everything to your computer at home. Awasu will save everything about your current setup at work to a data file that you can load up at home to bring your home copy of Awasu up-to-date.
Open the Save sync data dialog from the main menu and choose where you want to save the data file. This could be a floppy disk or keychain drive that you take home with you, even a file on your PC that you then email to yourself at home. Or if you have FTP space somewhere, you can upload it there instead.
Alternatively, you can choose to run a command after the sync data has been saved and use SCP or SFTP (or anything else) to copy the data file to your server.
Historical data should be set to at least the number the days between each sync. For example, if you sync between home and work 5 days a week, this should be set to something larger than 3 (i.e. the 3 days between Friday and Monday). Setting this value incorrectly will not have any serious consequences other than Awasu sometimes erroneously flagging items that you have already seen or read as new or unread.
You can also choose to include the last feed received for each channel. This slows synchronization down and increases the size of the sync data file considerably but allows the other computer to immediately have a copy of the latest feed for each channel instead of having to download it again.
Once you get home, open the Load sync data dialog from the main menu and open the data file you saved previously. This will do everything required to bring your home copy of Awasu in sync with the one at work i.e. create new channel subscriptions, delete old ones, update your channel favorites, etc.
You can also choose to not synchronize certain things. For example, blackout times are something that you will probably want to keep different on your work and home computers and so you can disable this in the Don't synchronize these list.
It is possible to disable the synchronization of anything and everything so if there's something you would like to exclude that is not already in the list, post a request in the forums to get the necessary incantations.
The first time you load a sync data file, it is strongly recommended that you have the report turned on. If you are using plugin channels, there is one (very rare) scenario where Awasu will not be able to determine which channel on your work machine corresponds to which channel on your home machine and so won't be able to synchronize them. In this case, it will ignore them and notify you in the report. If this happens, delete the channels that are reported as having been ignored and redo the load. This only needs to be done once and after that, Awasu will be able to match up these channels correctly.
Also, if you have any external files (e.g. customized templates files, plugin scripts, etc.), these need to be transferred manually. If you have Awasu installed in different directories, any paths will be translated appropriately but you will still need to copy over the files themselves yourself.
Once you have got the hang of how everything works, you can turn on auto-loading and auto-saving of the sync data in the Program Options. This will automatically load the sync data file when Awasu starts and save it when it exits. This is particularly handy for sync load since you will find that it runs faster if done at startup. However, it is recommended that you only turn this option on after everything has settled down and syncs are being done without any warnings or errors. Problems that are detected during the loading of a sync data file are not logged to the report if it is done at startup. They will be reported via balloons and logged to the Error Log as per normal but it can be a bit misleading to look at a sync report and think that everything worked perfectly when in fact, there were errors.