Syncing two folders?

I recommend ChronoSync:

http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html

 

Apparently there's one called Lion that will do that.

 

Say, you're pretty good at reading between the lines. Oh wait, there was only one line...

 

If you are comfortable with the terminal, you can type

Code:

rsync -rtuv ~/Music/ /DestinationHD/

to sync your ~/Music/ folder to the HD.

 

There's no "sync folder" in Lion. I don't know what @Gregg2 was talking about.

Anyways, if you want automated syncing of two folders, take a look at Dropbox. It's reliable... install Dropbox on both machines, and the folder it creates for itself will sync between machines.

 

Gotcha. I recommended ChronoSync in an earlier reply, and stand by the recommendation. I use it to do exactly what you want to do... backup my iTunes library to an external drive.

It's got lots of options (which can be overwhelming... if you want drop-dead simplicity, this might not be the software for you!), but it's very stable and gets the job done.

Downside: not free

 

Sorry for the bad information. I thought I'd read that somewhere. Or maybe my brain just confused that with some other common Mac OS complaint I read was addressed by Lion.

 

Harder to Sync files in Lion

It gets worse, Lion no longer has the "Skip File" option in the Copy diolog box when dragging-n-dropping files from one folder to another. This makes it difficlut to make sure "Folder B" has all the files from "Folder A" by dragging the files over. In the past, all you had to do was click on Skip File's with the "Apply to All" box checked and it would copy or move all the new files while leaving the old files alone. Not any more.

 

Oops! I have to apologize again. According to MacWorld, September 2011 page 48:
"Drop a folder onto another one with the same name, and the Finder will offer to merge their contents..."

Would that not be what was meant by "sync"?

Maybe it's really "merge". But, wouldn't merge + merge = sync ? So, I did read that somewhere else, just as I thought initially.

 

Use this free app called arRsync.

it's a simple interface, this way you do not need to use the CLI.

I use it all the time to create backups of some flash drives with one click.

 

I think that refers to the older problem where if you tried to move a folder onto another one of the same name it would replace the entire folder. IIRC Lion is supposed to actually make sure that the source folder doesn't replace the target folder. I don't think it tries to merge the individual files - that would be a mess. What if you had a database that you designed and only you knew the exact structure - an attempt by the OS to merge the two databases would result in garbage.

 

I thought the idea of a merge was to add new files to the target folder without losing files in it that are not in the source folder. I've never had the impression that it altered files, only copy and keep.

 

Mobile Sync In Lion

is available for domain accounts via the users and groups control panel - mobile account...

http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/it/centralmac/HomeSync.htm

 

AASync

I use AASync and it works great. Plus it's free if you use it on locally accessed drives like thumb drives or external HDs.

http://www.aasync.com

 

Thank you SO much! rsync was giving me grief, but it looks like this will work for syncing two external hard drives!