Profile-sync-daemon

Profile-sync-daemon (psd) is a tiny pseudo-daemon designed to manage your browser's profile in tmpfs and to periodically sync it back to your physical disc (HDD/SSD). This is accomplished via a symlinking step and an innovative use of rsync to maintain back-up and synchronization between the two. One of the major design goals of psd is a completely transparent user experience.

Good Advice

Always backup your browser profile(s) before using psd for the first time.

Users of eCryptFS

User of eCryptFS are encouraged not to use psd unless willing to help troubleshoot suspected browser corruption. See #158.

Supported Browsers

• Chromium
• Conkeror
• Epiphany
• Firefox (stable, beta, and aurora)
• Firefox-trunk (this is an Ubuntu-only browser: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/install-firefox-nightly-from-ubuntu-ppa.html)
• Google Chrome (stable, beta, and dev)
• Heftig's version of Aurora (this is an Arch Linux-only browser: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117157)
• Icecat (GNU version of Firefox)
• Iceweasel (Debian version of Firefox)
• Inox (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763)
• Luakit
• Midori
• Opera, Opera-Beta, Opera-Developer, and Opera-Legacy
• Otter-browser
• Palemoon
• QupZilla
• Qutebrowser
• Rekonq
• Seamonkey
• Surf (http://surf.suckless.org/)
• Vivaldi-browser and Vivaldi-browser-snapshot

Documentation

Consult the man page or the wiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon

Installation from Source

To build from source, see the included INSTALL text document.

Installation from Distro Packages

Officially Packaged

• Arch: in the extra repo.
• Debian: in the official repos.
• Exherbo: in the official repos.
• Fedora: in the official repos.
• Gentoo: in the official repos.
• NixOS: in the official repo.
• Ubuntu: in Universe repo.

User Packaged

• Slackware: on slackbuilds.

Other Distros

If you are interested in packaging psd for your favorite distro, please contact me.

logcheck

Using logcheck? Here are some ways to filter out log lines:

^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ profile-sync-daemon\[[0-9]+]\]: .*(google-chrome|firefox) (re|un)sync successful
^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ profile-sync-daemon\[[0-9]+\]: psd startup check successful$
^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[[0-9]+\]: Started Timer for profile-sync-daemon
^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[[0-9]+\]: psd(-resync)?\.service: Consumed [0-9\.]+s CPU time\.$
^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[[0-9]+\]: psd(-resync)\.timer: Succeeded\.$