2 macs, 1 profile?

[semaja2]

Hi guys,

What do you do to combine two macs to have the same profile, in my windows world i would of use roaming profiles and made the laptop cache my work.

However i have recently replaced my pc with my iMac which does all my main work now and my iBook sits there waiting to be used outside of my house, however i need a solution that will keep the profile on both updated on a daily basis.

Any ideas?

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

.Mac

 

[4legsmedia]

I was wondering about the same thing, I also have 2 macs. And I need to sync the 2 often. I'm not sure if I'd like to pay 99$ a year to sync only email, favorites etc... I want to sync files too.

What I found out is:
OS X stores the 'data' of an app in the users/your name/Library/Application support. For example: Mail is in ..../Library/Mail/
Backup that folder and delete it, when you start mail you will have a clean Mail. Copy that folder to your other mac, and your mail is merged.

You could use a synchronising software on the Mac, to sync the folders (data) of choice... It is not as elegant as .doc or other automatic synching solutions but it works. Or you could just do it manually.

 

[MacVault]

.Mac

Here's why .Mac sucks...

1) Bandwidth limited by one's internet connection. How will I ever sync my 80 GB of Music and Video files???

2) For security reasons I would rather not put my documents, etc on someone else's (Apple in this case) servers. FBI can demand them at any time without the user's knowledge.

3) It costs $99 per year.

4) .Mac just plain SUCKS. It seems like a half-baked project. It seems to be one of Apple last priorities among it's many projects - and rightly so because OS X development, hardware, etc should be more important anyway.

 

[semaja2]

I know that all the profiles data is stored in /Users/<name> but the hard part is keeping the data from over ridding data on the other.

I was thinking about using a rysnc option and syncing from the one i just used to the other, but this would require me to only use one at a time for a long period of time.

Anyone else got some free suggestions?

 

[yellow]

I'm afriad that you're going to be hard presssed to come up with a decent workable solution for free.

 

[nplima]

Google is your friend

Google is your friend. really

If you use Firefox you can keep your "favourites" in sync with "google browser sync". This will keep the bookmarks and optionally some other files (cookies, passwords, ...) on Google servers where you can reach with any Firefox browser, meaning you can share your bookmarks across Windows, Mac, Linux boxes.

As for email, using Gmail POP access will probably be multi-computer friendly. Just keep your email on Google servers and keep 2 different copies of a POP client (Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbid) on your computers. You can even get portable Thunderbird to launch and run exclusively on your iPod (or other USB mass storage), so all your email is with you at all times.

As for the rest of your /Users/ folder, best is you get Sync (a GUI implementation of rsync) and use it when your laptop comes home. Same applies if you decide to keep your /home in an iPod drive.

 

[Arne]

I use unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) for syncing two servers. You can tunnel it threw SSH. SSH can be paired so taht you would not have to enter a password all the time. I use it on a daily basis and it fits my needs as it would propably fit yours. But it is however not the easiest thing to install. I have never installed it on a Mac but I guess it will be similar to the install on Linux. If you give it a try and face problems, don't hesitate to ask me