If you regularly work with multiple Macs you
might need a solution for having all your data available on all your Macs.
There are two strategies to solve this challenge:
- Tell all your Macs to use the same home directory. The data can be centrally stored on a Mac OS X Server, in an Active Directory or on an iPod (see home on iPod) that you carry from Mac to Mac.
- You use multiple home directories that you synchronize with each other.
Strategy number two obviously needs a solution for synchronizing your data. Yet, even with strategy number one you need a solution for backing up your data (you don’t want to depend on an iPod only that can be stolen or get lost). So both strategies need some help to compare data in two folders to copy only recently changed data from one point to the other.
Use the following description to backup your user account from an iPod to your local Mac or vice versa or to copy data via a network, both for backup or synchronization purposes.
First you need a free software program called Synk (download and description here). You can synchronize any data on volumes that you can read and write in the Finder, no matter if they are connected locally or mounted remotely using AFP. Because the program runs as root, it can copy multiple users from one system to another, too.
Before you start Synk, make sure that both the data resource and the target folder are accessible from the Finder. Now start the program.
If you click on the folder icons on the left, you can choose the resource and target paths. The menu in between lets you choose the action. “Synchronize” replaces older files with their new versions and copies newly created files to the other volume. “Backup” and “reverse backup” both replace one folder with another, the difference between the two lies in the direction only. In the panels “Settings” and “Archive” you can choose to consider changes of file permissions and to archive files that Synk replaces by newer files.
Just hit “run” and your iPod and your Mac will be in sync within no time.
One really cool feature of Synk is, that you can save its settings and open these files with a double click.
Save your favourite preferences as a file and add it to your startup items. Whenever you log in to your iPod, you just have to hit “run” to synchronize your data.
I guess there must be a scriptable synchronization software for Panther that could make it possible to sync your data completely automatically during login. Yet, as the syncing progress takes some time, it can also be called a feature to have the choice.
Please be aware, that you try this tip on your own risk!