Syncing between two remote Macs?

[rdav]

Syncing between two remote Macs?

I have two Macs, one at each of two locations (home-office and business). One is a Mac Pro (2009) and the other is a recent MacMini, both with OS-X 10.6 and similar specifications. Would like to have both machines seamlessly match so that I can travel between them with no loss of application functionality. There is only one user, so one Mac will always have the more recent data.

I understand that there are work-arounds, such as just replacing everything with a new laptop. Or physically transporting an external drive, perhaps backed up via SuperDuper or Qdea for example. But a backup/restore can take a long time (at each end). So, is it possible to do this without a hardware “sneaker-net” solution?

Third-party apps such as ChronoSync and Martian Slingshot would seem to offer some possibilities. But would that work with an Apple Mail database for example? Obviously, it is the data that needs to be synced, not the apps, but would there be any issues with application licenses (since some Apps look at the machine ID)? And would it be necessary to sync the Library/Application Support files too? And what about application updates etc?

Cloud solutions such as Dropbox and Mozy are great for smaller files, but some of the databases we use are several Gigs in size, which is way beyond their capability (both in upload time and capacity). For example, even an iTunes database might have some minor changes each day, which would need to be synced.

Any suggestions, and has anyone tried this?
Thanks.

 

[rdav]

How to Keep Your Workflow in Sync Across Computers.

All those views and no replies, I guess this is a difficult subject. Lifehacker has a recent post with some (mostly Windows) solutions, but it only goes a small way towards a real answer.
lifehacker.com/5638130/how-to-keep-your-workflow-in-sync-across-computers

 

[Panch0]

Screen Sharing?

how about if one of the machines becomes the 'primary', and when in the other location you connect to it using Screen Sharing? The remote mac is then just a dumb terminal more or less.

You can easily set this up through MobleMe & BackToMyMac (So easy in fact that I did it by accident yesterday). There are many other solutions that would allow the same functionality though - VPN/SSH, VNC, many others I'm sure.

The same techniques could also be used to simply attach to a shared drive/folder on the primary machine (again, I did it by accident...), which would allow you to access the same data/files on both systems, but might require multiple licenses for your apps.

Generally Screen Sharing or some other Remote Control mechanism is going to be more network friendly than directly attaching to a remote drive. All it has to send across the wire are your mouse/keyboard inputs and a picture of the remote display.