Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

RobOUK

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 21, 2009
5
0
This goes out to those of you who own both a MacMini/iMac and a MacBook. I was just wondering what sort of setups you guys have to share data (videos, music, documents) between your machines. It would be useful to have all/most of my data available on all machines, and available quickly.

It would also be useful to have things such as my calendar, address book and iphotos shared between my machines too.

I'm just wondering what people think is the best way to do this and whether there are any cool applications out there which could make this integration easier.

Any thoughts would be very welcome.

Cheers.
 
Any thoughts would be very welcome.

All the local solutions I have found left me wanting.

I use web mail (Yahoo), because it is the most convenient.

I use a web calendar (Google), because it is feature rich and a bunch of machine-based clients can use it.

For media, I bought a NAS (ReadyNAS). 4tb RAID 5. It has my music and movies. Very convenient. I ripped my entire DVD collection to my NAS and have a nice Vista Media Center set up for my home theater.

Same thing with documents.

For photo-sharing, I use flickr. For processing, I tend to place the RAW images on the local machine, process, and then I copy them over to the NAS. If I want to re-process, I tend to copy them back to the local machine, re-edit, and then replace the images (make sure the sidecars are all up to date).

I also do all my backups to the NAS (the ReadyNAS is Time Machine compatible). I create ISO images of all my commercial software. I do system images as well.

And since I am in the risk management business, I also bought another NAS (Intel SS4200-E) to backup the main NAS. Just in case.

And, since I am rather attached to my photographs, I create a monthly backup on a removable drive and keep it off-site. I have two drives that swap out in a rotation.
 
Yeah, no really good ways to sync up everything.

My MBP is my primary computer and the mini is my media server, always on.
I can find the files I need using screen sharing or accessing the drive over the network. Every once in a while I'll archive my addressbook from MacBook and restore it to the mini so I have accurate info to send mail. And of course, my mail is all imap so that I can access it from any machine.
 
I would love to hear about someone having a real success story, though, using something like DropBox or similar.
 
I got into the habit of backing-up after I lost ALL of my photos from my summer trips last year (California, University of Notre Dame Leadership Conference, Florida). I back up to a 160GB HDD from my old PC. It holds my 30 GB of music and over 80 GB of photos, and a few movies too. All of my photos are also backed up onto my website, and the majority of my "keepers" are up on flickr. My music and movies library is also stored on my 80GB iPod classic, ready to be ExPodded or Senuti'd off in case **** hits the fan. I have DropBox installed but have yet to use it.
 
I use Dropbox for all of the files that contain something I've actually worked on. Since for me that's mostly text, the 2 gig free account is sufficient.

Although it takes a bit of effort to set up, and I don't use it right now, another good tool for syncing machines is Unison.
 
I don't have a Mini + MacBook, but MacBook + MacBook Pro. I usually install the same programs but keep my personal data on a external HD. iTunes/iPhoto etc is only on my MacBook Pro.
 
I have a Mac Mini and a MBP. My Mini acts as a host for my printer and hard drives and I remote into it from my MBP when I want to do stuff on it. I only use the Mac Mini directly when using Plex.
 
Which is the best remote access program to operate my mini from my macbook. If it could be free that would also be great!!
 
The one built into Mac OSX, Screen Sharing.

It is located at <Hard Disk>/System/Library/CoreServices. Copy it to the Applications folder.

If you want to have everything synced, the only proper solution is either a Mac Pro with OS X Server or an Xserve. If you've got a spare computer, sharing the iTunes libraries is pretty easy.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.