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Geek Throwdown: How to sync two or more Macs?

Enter the Octagon

Here’s an experimental new feature: The Throwdown. Take a problem that lots of people face and tell us your personal favorite way to deal with it — in as much detail and with as much persuasion as you can muster.

Today, a lot of us are living on two or more Macs -- which is great, except for the challenge of keeping the contents and settings of multiple machines effortlessly in sync.

Now before you pop in, holler "dot mac," and jump back on your Segway®, consider that many folks (including your author) are looking for a lot more than simple document syncing and perfunctory preference sharing. How about if your needs are more nuanced:

  • Can it intelligently sync "~/Library" stuff like "Preferences" and "Application Support" for your apps (so that Quicksilver, for example, is with you and tweaked to perfection wherever you go)? Is it smart enough to know which items not to sync?
  • Can it do smarter comparisons than "which one is newer?" -- consider that someone on 4 or 5 Macs may run into complex versioning problems that currently make .Mac very confused. For text, can it do diff3-style merging?
  • Will it update often enough (and automatically enough) that I can trust when I sit down at a new machine, I'll know everything's up to date without checking (or manual re-updating)?
  • Can backups be easily automated? And is it easy to restore across all machines?
  • Does it work for people on airplanes? If your solution requires a live internet connection for active usage (e.g. traditional WebDAV), what happens when that access is no longer available?

You get the idea. You have a system; now tell us about it. Bow to your sensei, then spare no detail.

How do you sync your Macs?

rsync? ChronoSync? Synchronize? Unison? Something you made yourself?

What are using to sync your Macs, and how are you using it?

wreising's picture

.Mac is so close

I agree that .Mac has a tremendous amount of potential but inadequate execution.

I also get the occasional sync error. It seems related to having two Macs sync at the same time. I would think Apple could make the sync agent smarter.

.Mac really needs a way to look at all of the info that is being synced and edit the Master directly and have that populate out.

As it is now, I have little faith that when I make a change to a document on my iDisk it will actually be updated on my other Macs. Not good.

I think it as OmniFocus that did my daily use of my iDisk in. I had the same locked file problems, but it got worse when I would get errors that the document had been edited by two different Macs which resulted in a totally hosed database.

You only have to recreate a large OmniFocus database once before you look for a better solution.

 
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