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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

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?

Keith's picture

Portable Home Folder and the Airplane Problem

I do indeed daisy-chain my external disks together. I have seven external Firewire disks attached at the moment. Two are clones of my Home folder, two consist of my video library and its clone, and three are staggered incremental backups of the Home folder and the video library. I also have another drive that I plug in about once a month to clone my internal boot drive.

My external drive with my Home folder has actually died twice (nothing lasts forever!), but each time I just plugged in a clone and kept going. The first time I didn't lose any data, the second time I lost about ten e-mail messages that arrived between the backup time and the drive failure.

On airplanes I just plug in my external drive with the portable Home folder and use it like I do everywhere else. It consumes a little extra power but I pack extra batteries.

If you didn't want to do that, then you could clone the external drive with your portable Home folder to a disk image on the internal hard drive with the same name as your external drive. (You could log into a different user account in order to mount the disk image, then switch into your regular user account.) When you got to your hotel room you could then clone the disk image back to your external drive.

And no, there are no symlinks necessary with these ideas.

 
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