More on Syncing Between Macs

Published 1 May 05 by Justin French, 4 comments

IMAP, of course

I’ve been using IMAP ever since I first signed up with TextDrive almost a year ago, so obviously I’ve got my email synched up, no worries at all.

.Mac & Tiger

It looks like there’s been some cool upgrades and additions to .Mac integrated with Tiger (which I’ll upgrade to soon enough):

You can already sync contact information, calendars, and Safari bookmarks Mac-to-Mac and to .Mac for access from any Internet-connected computer. Now, with Tiger installed, you’ll be able to sync passwords from your Keychain and Mac OS X Mail preferences—including accounts, rules, signatures and the new Spotlight-driven Smart Mailboxes—Mac-to-Mac. Tiger’s powerful sync features put key information at your fingertips wherever you need it.

Since I already use Address Book, Apple Mail, iCal, Safari and an iPod, it would appear that iSync in Tiger (combined with a US$99.95 .Mac account, unfortunately) will be able to handle a fair chunk of synchronisation between two or more Macs. Nice.

Syncing files and folders

Then Dan linked to Ethan’s article on Sidesh0w which mentions rsync (very geek, very powerful), and ChronoSync which (amongst many other claims) has the ability to synchronize two computers:

ChronoSync brings power and simplicity to the old hassles of keeping your laptop and desktop computers in sync. No more forgetting to update your contacts list, or forgetting to move that important presentation to the laptop. ChronoSync automates these tasks for you in a stable, easy-to-use environment. It keeps track of every file so only files that have changed get updated, If both files have changed, several options are given so you don’t copy over a file you need. In addition to synchronizing between two Mac OS X computers, you can also synchronize between a Mac and a PC.

If it can do what they say it can (Ethan seems to think so), this could indeed be the solution I’m looking for.

Subversion, WebDAV, etc

It also occurs to me that I have my very own iDisk sitting on TextDrive’s servers (iDisk is basically an implementation of WebDAV). Surely someone could write a .Mac-like syncing application which can be hooked up to any WebDAV server, instead of locking me into $99.95 every year? Perhaps it can already exists?

I also have Subversion (SVN) repositories on my TextDrive account, and SVN is particularly good at version control and collaboration. Whilst it’s not feasible to put my entire hard drive into SVN, I’m seriously looking at using it for all my web development projects, and there’s certainly no reason why it couldn’t be used for some other key files, like /private/etc/hosts and /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf to keep my entire web development platform portable.

There’s not a lot of GUI solutions for SVN yet, but I’m imagining once I’m comfortable enough with the SVN command line, I’d be able to write some quick scripts (even Apple Scripts?) which could do most of the heavy lifting for me.

Is there more?

Are there some more syncing solutions out there that I haven’t covered? Please chime in. Ultimately, I’d love a complete solution to keep two Macs perfectly in sync, but I’ll take any suggestions that get me “close enough”.

PS: Yes, I’m aware of PsyncX & CarbonCopyCloner, but they seem to be a one-way or master-to-slave solution for back-up, rather than a two-way thing, as far as I can tell.