Any new ideas on "Syncing 2 Macs"

Superduper has the ability to do incremental updates, so syncing might be faster with that. I'm not sure if CCC has that feature or not. Be careful, though -- you can use superduper to just do your home folder, but it will make the contents of the disk you clone it to contain JUST your home folder. If you did that from your laptop to your desktop, that'd wipe out your system partitions on the target system. If you had your home folder on a separate partition, that could work fine.

Still, it's not ideal, and no, I don't think the ideal solution for this kind of syncing is really there yet. The best one that I've come up with is also the cheapest, which is just to use the 'rsync' command to keep your home directories in sync. As long as ssh is enabled on the machine, it'd be something like

rsync -e ssh -auv /Users/username/ targetmachine:/Users/username

You'd want to run that on whichever machine you'd been using most recently, and would have to keep that in your head, sort of. Not ideal either, but for most things, it might be fine.

There was a recent posting on this, as well, where I believe some other users posted some software suggestions. I remember at the end of the thread feeling like the answer was still -- it's 100 times easier just to be synced for the big things, but not worry about always being in sync. Or use one machine for more or less everything.

phelix_da_kat said:

Hi,
Same old question.. holy grail.. etc

Has there been any update on the old question of syncing between two Macs? 🙄

I have an intel iMac and MBP. I would like to basically sync my user account between them (and keep and manage all my libraries of iPhoto, iTunes & iWeb as I am up to 60G).

1. At the moment I am basically using Carbon Copy Cloner to sync. But this is a hassle as I seem to have to clone the WHOLE drive. (BTW is it possible just to clone the user folder? are there any "other" files I would be missing and need to include?)

2. I think this could be solved if I bought the Server Edition, but its an expensive outlay (although I could prob get a cheap copy of Tiger Server as Leopard is due out soon - but I want Leopard!! not enough $$$$ for server)
http://www.radiotope.com/writing/?p=22

3. My Dream App's (MDA) Portal is not ready yet and there is NO time scale.. this sound perfect...


Thanks folks..

Click to expand...

I use Chronosync for that purpose

phelix_da_kat said:

Has anyone compared these two recently?
They are both boosting updates..

Click to expand...

I use Chronosync for both backups, and syncs. I examined that and superduper both, and for selective backup/copy/sync, chronosync seemed far superior.

I have a bunch of profiles set up now, it just copies the folders (and subfolders) that I choose to the destination of my choice. Couldn't be easier.

I'm another one using Chronosync. I can't imagine anything easier for syncing my user folder (including all my photos and my iTunes library) between my MBP and iMac. It also lets you filter out anything you don't want to sync, set up custom rules, automatically schedule syncs and much more. Great app... 🙂

phelix_da_kat said:

Has anyone compared these two recently?
They are both boosting updates..

Click to expand...

I don't know about comparing them as they're two quite different apps. I own paid versions of both, and I use Chronosync for syncing specific user and data folders on my two Macs, and SuperDuper for creating bootable clones of my system drives as a backup.

Chronosync is no replacement for SuperDuper, as it can't create true a true clone of a drive as can the latter so I wouldn't want to use it as a backup solution. But equally I'd want to use Chronosync and not SuperDuper to sync two folders where they may be file changes in both folders that need synchronising and file conflicts that require resolving.

pna said:

rsync -e ssh -auv /Users/username/ targetmachine:/Users/username

Click to expand...

Thanks alot for that, works great!