Since I got the MacBook Air, I’ve been using it as my exclusive laptop. The MacBook Pro has not even been disconnected from my 30” at the home office desk a single time. The joys, wonders, and more-than-adequate-for-real-work goodness of the Air is for a post in itself, though.
What has really surprised me is that having two Macs is not half the hassle I thought it would be. I remember back in the day when I still had my PC and I got a iBook what a pain it was to keep the two in reasonable sync. That scared me good from ever having two machines again.
But times have indeed changed. Here are the tools that keep me happy with two machines:
- .Mac: It keeps my bookmarks, contacts, and keychain in constant sync. All happening in the background. Once you turn it on, you never think of it again. It just works.
- IMAP: I’ve used IMAP in the past with varying levels of success, but for now it just seems to work. I’m using GMail and can now enjoy the same, synced inbox across the MBP, MBA, iPhone, and web access.
- SVN: All my code for joy and profit lives in source repositories in the sky. So whatever I check in on one is available on the next machine I work on.
These three tools cover 95% of all my syncing needs and probably yours too. The only thing that I don’t yet have a good, automatic solution to is photos, music, and my desktop.
So far I haven’t been bothered enough to set up something techy like rsync and have just copied things back and forth by hand, but it would be nice to top it off with something here. A little disappointing that .Mac can’t cover these three bases too, but not a big deal.
So if you’re thinking of either getting a Mac Pro in addition to your laptop or an Air in addition to whatever, I’d say you at least shouldn’t think twice because of the trouble with keeping the two in sync.
Paul
on 14 Feb 08Funny, I was just thinking about this stuff today. But I’m always glad to hear what works for others.
Jeff Croft
on 14 Feb 08I generally agree. Apple has done a pretty awesome job of making this relatively painless—which, it turns out, was a necessity, since they’re not selling a computer with is actually targeted at people who already own another Mac.
I don’t have too much concern about iTunes and iPhoto - I don’t keep that stuff on my laptop, and I’m fine with that (I can always stream it to the laptop when I need to). But, I do with there was a better solution for files like Photoshop documents and such. My code all lives in SVN - maybe I just need to move my other project files into SVN, too. Hmm…
Shawn
on 14 Feb 08@David
Does 37signals use Google Apps (for your domain) as your email service provider?
Kenn Wilson
on 14 Feb 08I keep important files in my Powerbook and iMac home directories in sync using Unison (installed via MacPorts). I’ts similar to rsync except that it can do two-way synchronization. It’s not perfect but it works pretty well for my needs.
Hans
on 14 Feb 08Glad to hear that the Air is a great product. I thought about getting one, but since I only plan on having one laptop with no other computers, the Macbook seems like a more practical choice (if not a bit less portable).
In terms of photos, music, etc., why don’t you start storing everything in the “cloud”? You seem to be well on your way with IMAP/gmail, .MAC (your info is basically on the web), and SVN. Having it on the Internet means you can access it from anywhere and from any device.
For photos, you could use things like Picasa or Flickr. Music might require a more dedicated option, but online storage is getting very inexpensive today.
Now that I think about it, maybe a Macbook Air could work for me too :) Unfortunately, I need a bit more horse power right now.
Joe Fusco
on 14 Feb 08I’m sure Apple makes it easy, but isn’t the real issue the fact that we’re living our lives more and more “online”?
I’ve found that between Highrise, Basecamp, gmail, Google Calendar, Google Documents, a very small, portable 160GB drive, and box.net, it doesn’t even matter which computer I’m on anywhere in the world.
Eric
on 14 Feb 08Do you think that Time Capsule (http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/) would help with you Music, Photos, Video, etc? I was considering using it when I make the switch to the mac. Of course it would only work when I am at home but that is probably fine 90% of the time for me. My photos generally go on Flickr, my music is mostly on my iPod, and I don’t care all that much about having video with me everywhere but I suppose that could go on YouTube.
Quali Mumphfasi
on 14 Feb 08Try www.foldershare.com It syncs any/all folders across macs and PCs pretty seamlessly.
Thank you and god bless.
Aaron Vegh
on 14 Feb 08I’ve helped my Dad solve this problem with Chronosync (http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html); he doesn’t have .Mac, but this app can sync his entire home directory between his MacBook and iMac, so they’re kept identical.
James Head
on 14 Feb 08A big problem is if your itunes music archive or your iphoto archive is of any significant size, you really would not want the whole lots synced over to the tiny hard drive on your macbook air.
It would be an incredible feature if itunes and iphoto library sharing worked over the internet, rather than just a local network.
DHH
on 14 Feb 08I don’t mind keeping my media in the sky, but it would have to be for backup/syncing purposes. I don’t want to give up the speed and ease of use with iPhoto and iTunes.
I only have about 20GB of media, so it fits fine on my 64GB SSD.
coldclimate
on 14 Feb 08re: photos etc. Network storage rather than local hosting. I use a Synology 407e cube, and it works brilliantly, and you stuff isn’t sitting on a public website like flickr where you are at the mercy of them not going out of business/messing up ther permission meaning your kids photos are all over the web, etc etc. Helps if you’re on a nice fast network mind.
Jeremy
on 14 Feb 08[...] MBP, MBA, iPhone [...]
Must be nice to have so much disposable income that you can afford to have three devices that all do basically the same things…
Peter Cooper
on 14 Feb 08I do a similar thing with all my Macs, although I don’t have any regular bookmarks (all on del.icio.us!) and don’t use IMAP or local contacts (the GMail Web client is ridiculously good). The future is Web services, but I think 37signals knows that, which is why people are packing their contacts into Highrise instead ;-) I don’t have a single icon on my desktop or in my dock either (Spotlight FTW!), so no big deal there either!
One other trick you can use is Flash memory sticks. I think someone posted about this on SVN recently. Just create encrypted sparseimages, put them on Flash memory sticks, then carry those around with you, ready to roll on any machine, and still secure. The ideal way to move all your documents / code / whatever around with you, then let Web apps pick up the rest (e-mail, calendar, text documents, etc.)
Tim
on 14 Feb 08For the other documents, you could get AirPort Extreme (or Time Capsule soon) with an external hard-drive.
Using internet storage would work too obviously but I suppose one could object a few things:
-privacy issues
-you need to be online (more and more arguable these days, but still)
-long download/upload time for big libraries like music and pictures.
As for your general point on how the Macs make things easy, I completely concur. Even though I don’t like the fact that Apple stuff works mostly with Apple stuff, when you can afford living in a completely Apple world, everything is a lot easier.
GeeIWonder
on 14 Feb 08I used to run a box that would serve up my playlists from a home server (on the same box) on request via a browser or Winamp or MediaPlayer Radio or whatever the machine I was on ran. If I wanted a new playlist, I logged in to a different port and had a nice webserver interface. Works nicely, and it’s easy to set it up for hifi when your network is great (most of the time) and lowfi when you’re on a 9600 baud.
Jinzora does something similar. There are others (VLC for DVDs, etc.) Get your colleagues to spend an afternoon and set one up for you guys, then slap a Terabyte drive on that baby.
Peter Cooper
on 14 Feb 08The iPhone doesn’t do even vaguely the same things as an MBA or MBP. Besides, is $6000 or so really “so much disposable income?” Over a year I know people who spend more than that on cigarettes and cable TV.. and David clearly has these machines primarily for business, not pleasure. If $6000 is a lot of money to spend in a year, you’re in the wrong business!
Otto VanTeasdahl
on 14 Feb 08But what about the whimpy battery life? Uncle Walt said it doesn’t even barely last 3 hours. How are you handling that?
bra
on 14 Feb 08Would SVN work as a synchronizing tool? I thought about this when my brother in California asked me to keep a copy of his coding projects after the last earthquake hit, just in case. I do an SVN update every few days, providing him with an offsite backup.
That got me thinking about using SVN myself to synch my documents folder between two computers. The only problem I can see is that when you create new documents you have to remember to add them to the repository, whereas standard synch software would take care of that automatically. Any thoughts?
Etienne Segonzac
on 14 Feb 08The iDisk synchronization feature is also great for non-code stuffs like Pages documents. I usually let my current customers folders on my iDisk.
BTW, I find the IMAP experience much faster with the .Mac servers than the Google ones.
AkitaOnRails
on 14 Feb 08One thing that you may want to try is putting your iPhone library into iDisk. You probably will want to have at least 2 Libraries: one for most recent photos and another for archives because those libraries tend to become big very fast with current multi-megabit cameras. That way you would have a synchronized small library and another in an external drive. Dunno if .Mac’s Web Gallery would fit the bill as well. But for a hassle free way to actually sync back and forth between the 2 machines, ChronoSync may help, it’s actually a GUI for rsync I think.
Finally, instead of SVN you would like to try GIT ;-) Maybe an official Rails GIT repo one day? hehe
Jonathan Markwell
on 14 Feb 08Keep an eye on these guys: http://www.getdropbox.com
I’m pretty sure they’ll solve your folder syncing problem. Much better than FolderShare which has been, unfortunately, stunted by it’s Microsoft aquisition.
Alexander
on 14 Feb 08FolderShare is a good alternative. Also, timecapsule allows for data syncing across multiple machines…
Paul Erickson
on 14 Feb 08Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m holding out for the NotMac to become more solid. I know it’s not much, but I can’t justify syncing my bookmarks for $99 via .Mac.
Am I a fool?
Otto VanTeasdahl
on 14 Feb 08Forgot to mention above, but Amazon’s s3 is a great place to put stuff. I use JungleDisk to hit it, but there are other open source alternatives that can hit it as well. This has reduced the file load on my mobile computers substantially.
Brooks
on 14 Feb 08bra, I use SVN for all of my documents and it works great. It does mean remembering to do a commit after creating new files or updating existing ones, but that becomes second nature (especially if you’re used to doing it for code).
It is amazing how handy it is to have every document, scan, etc, synced and available everywhere, and you get version control for free so it is easy to find old copies of documents.
Yaphi
on 14 Feb 08Jeremy, lots of people have a laptop, desktop (in this case his macbook pro), and a cell phone. Get a job.
Terry Sutton
on 14 Feb 08hummm…...I seem to know about all kinds of tech-related stuff, but this SVN is beyond me. Anyone got a real-world definition and example for usage?
Derick
on 14 Feb 08I’ve been v. happy using Chronosync with 3 macs, 1 work, 1 laptop, 1 home desktop – it offers lots of customization so I can only sync appropriate stuff to the work machine (e.g. no personal financial data etc.). I’ve ditched local bookmarks altogether except the bookmarks bar, which I can recreate in a minute or two, & instead use del.icio.us. I use IMAP with fastmail.fm.
Chronosync would work fine for music, photos and desktop, & would make it easy to restrict certain folders give the MBA’s disk capacity…...
I also don’t add or update contacts v. often….any e-mails re: contact info. get stuck into a folder called addresses & I use spotlight in place of opening address book to look them up—thanks to IMAP they’re on each machine.
brad
on 14 Feb 08@Terry Sutton: SVN is “subversion” and is a version control system (similar in concept to Apple’s Time Machine, you can roll back to any previous version of a file). You set up a central “repository” on one computer and effectively “subscribe” to that repository from another. Although it has optional checkin/checkout features, in fact two people can be working on the same file at once and it will highlight any conflicts for you.
It’s used extensively in coding and web development. I’ve been using it on all my sites for the past six months or so and it’s much better than what I used to use (Microsoft Visual SourceSafe). In my brother’s case, he set up a repository on his computer, and I “subscribe” to it on my computer, which means I downloaded a copy of everything in his repository and have it on my machine. I update my copy every couple of days, which effectively provides him with an offsite backup in case something happens to his computer.
There’s a lot of documentation on SVN and an online book that describes it in detail. It’s a bit geeky to set up, but once it’s running it’s very simple to use. If you use Windows, Tortoise SVN is a fantastic SVN client; it integrates with Windows Explorer. There’s nothing quite as slick for the Mac, but there are good clients out there. Just do a Google for SVN or subversion and you’ll find everything you want.
Wolf
on 14 Feb 08There are no good SVN clients out there for Mac, but if you use Textmate and a bit of terminal, that works just fine.
Zend studio has a plugin somewhere for the PHP guys.
Evan
on 14 Feb 08I know what sizes HDDs are coming in these days, but I just can’t bring myself to call 64GB “tiny.” You can do a lot with that space. I’ve got 12GB cumulative storage in my Eee PC, and I’m quite happy with it so far.
Lowtech.org is a place that usually says similar things about computing power; it’s a neat site and worth a look.
Evan
on 14 Feb 08Also, that’s not to invalidate the point that the Air’s probably not the place to stash gigs and gigs of music.
Olivier
on 14 Feb 08SvnX is a pretty decent SVN client for MAC, but Textmate and the shell are enough most of the time.
Jamie
on 14 Feb 08Dude, for all your media it must be FolderShare.
https://www.foldershare.com/
Works beautifully.
Shawn Oster
on 14 Feb 08I have three different Vista machines, my laptop, home desktop and work desktop, and I haven’t had problems keeping them in sync for years, even when they were XP machines.
1. Delicious keeps me always a click away for my bookmarks.
2. SVN like you mentioned for complete and utter rockage.
3. GMail + IMAP is wonderful and I use it at home but it’s not even necessary since logging into gmail.com is just as easy as starting up your email app.
4. I use FeedDemon for feeds which uses NewsGator as your backend feed store so not only do you get that rich client experience but also your feeds are sync’d across all your machines. When you’re away you can use NewsGator online and there is also NetNewsWire for Macs so your feeds can be sync’d across any OS.
5. With my latest Windows Home Server purchase nothing is easier for keeping backups sync’d across all machines and sharing media with everyone. No more wondering where that one MP3 is, it’s just up on WHS, plus duplicate files on different machines aren’t backed up twice. so if you’ve pulled down a few gigs of your music onto both your laptop and desktop WHS will only backup one copy, knowing they’re the same file. I believe Time Machine has some of these features as well.
Point being, it’s been awhile since it’s been a hassle to have either OS X or Windows machines kept in sync. Thanks for putting the post out there to let people know progress has actually been made, I’m sure there are others that are gun shy as well.
Matt Carey
on 14 Feb 08+1 for chronoync!
PS
on 14 Feb 08Another JungleDisk recommendation here.
Once you’ve set up an Amazon S3 account and installed JungleDisk it’s just a case of choosing some folders and a backup time and then letting it do it’s stuff in the background. Works great.
Matt Carey
on 15 Feb 08As 37s use S3 for their data storage for their apps I’m sure they know all about it!!!
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Feb 08data synchronization issues wasn’t the reason I thought twice. return on investment for what amounts to a shiny package (air) was.
Kimbo
on 15 Feb 08I’ll also put in a vote for Unison. It runs on Macs, PCs, and Unix. I use it to get all my files onto the one PC that has online backup.
Jon
on 15 Feb 08I’ve been saying for years that Apple needs to let us sync to another iTunes like we sync our iPods.
I’ve been using a dual setup for years (iMac/MBP) and have 0 songs on my laptop. If i could sync to it like i sync my iPhone (certain playlists), it’d be sick.
It would have been a great feature to introduce with the air.
Tom
on 15 Feb 08The ease of keeping things in sync has always been one of my favorite things about using a Mac. You didn’t mention some of the other .Mac stuff—at some point, they added Preferences and Dock to the .Mac sync, and Yojimbo plugs in there, too. With those enabled, it’s like I’m always working on the same machine.
Music and video files are the real hassle, as you say, but my library has long since surpassed the ability of my laptop to hold it. I use my desktop as the mothership for all that stuff. Although it would be awfully nice for iTunes to sync my podcast subscriptions between machines.
For me, the real missing link in Apple’s sync setup is the iPhone/iPod sync—I’d really like it to be recognized by all my Macs, with the ability to define what gets synced by machine. So I could sync at home with everything, including my music and video files, but if I get a calendar update on my laptop while on the road I could plug in my iPhone and sync contacts and calendars from that machine as well.
With everything syncing so well on the Mac platform, it seems like an odd holdout that my iPhone has to be tethered to one machine.
dusoft
on 15 Feb 08Comparing few years ago to today? Lot of things changed, maybe it would sync today. Just the point of comparing few years ago to today is a bit absurd.
Also, try to sync iPod with multiple computers and then tell, how well it works (actaully, it doesn’t work at all, it will always delete all your files from your iPod!!! unless difficult-to-find option is unchecked). That’s my two cents to Apple software sync.
Ralf G.
on 15 Feb 08I use a similar setup, except the mobile one being a good old PowerBook G4 instead of a shiny new Air. ;-)
.mac, IMAP and svn are the weapons of choice, I agree, works fine.
For exchanging music, photos, PDF-books and docs and some folders with stuff I exchanged ssh-Keys beetween both machines and wrote a shell-script with a bunch of rsync-commands. I just let the script run and everything is fine.
I recompiled rsync back in the Tiger-times to resolve an issue with extended attribute, not quite sure wether this is solved in Leopard. But that’s the only trouble with rsync.
Mua bán nhà đất, căn hộ, đất nền dự án | Kinh doanh bất động sản
on 15 Feb 08Thần Tài Nhà Đất, chuyên thông tin mua bán nhà đất, bất động sản, đất nền dự án, căn hộ cao cấp, Mua ban nha dat, bat dong san, dat nen du an, du an quy hoach, dự án quy hoạch
Bruno Bergher
on 15 Feb 08I use Windows but am considering switching to Mac; but the lack of a good SVN client makes a bit of difference while weighting the platforms. I use Tortoise under Windows and it’s great, but my experience with SvnX is dreadful. So, David, what SVN client to you use?
Ed Gillett
on 15 Feb 08@Bruno Bergher – I agree, svnx was rubbish. SmartSVN was a hell of a lot better. It’s a Java client, but it’s fairly pretty. Just not as pretty as some other native cocoa apps. But hey, it works, which is infinitely more useful!
Used as the weapon of choise in a mixed business environment of designers on Macs and devs on PCs. Worked like a charm, and much more intuitive than svnX was.
Kevin
on 15 Feb 08Share your profile, pictures, etc. information on your big laptop using NFS. Then you can mount it on the Air without any problem and see it as a folder.
BrianC
on 15 Feb 08When I’m at home I share my desktop’s keyboard and mouse with my Macbook using teleport (http://www.abyssoft.com/software/teleport/). The best feature is it’s ability to drag and drop files from one machine to the other. Handy for simple file moving.
Setting up file sharing isn’t extremely hard, but I have both configured and find myself using teleport’s drag and drop more often than file sharing.
Bruno Bergher
on 15 Feb 08@Ed Gillet: Thank you, Ed! SmartSVN seems real nice. I’ll give it a try when I can.
Richard Bird
on 15 Feb 08Interesting discussions here. Just came across this Mac OS X subversion client in beta:
http://www.versionsapp.com/
Looks interesting.
Juanma Teixidó
on 15 Feb 08There are two things I can’t live without having 2 Macs:
1) Foxmarks 2) Synergy (this allows me to use just one keyboard and mouse on both the iMac and the lappy next to it. MIND BLOWING when you get used to it)
Joseph
on 15 Feb 08Check out Martian Sling Shot (www.martian.com) for iTunes and folder syncing. iTunes syncing is one way, but it can keep folders synced. I don’t work for the guy but I’m a happy customer :)
Bruno Bergher
on 15 Feb 08@Richard Bird: Nice tip! Seems good also… By the way, the way they handle the click on the ‘Get the beta’ button is really nice… Ought to get in one ‘Screens around town’ entry one of these days : )
Rick Roberts
on 15 Feb 08I keep all my files in (except photos and music) in my iDisk documents folder and turn on local idisk syncing. Works perfectly.
ale muñoz
on 15 Feb 08Those looking for a nice svn client for Mac should take a look at ZigVersion. The license is a bit expensive, but it’s free for personal use (and a rather good alternative/complement to the command line version)
Marlyse Comte
on 17 Feb 08Sync across several Mac’s has become MUCH better than it was in the past and at this point I no longer depend on 3rd party applications to help with this task.
You say Music and Photos are still a bit an issue. I think Apple’s idea for these applications is to use the “sharing” option. Not an option for myself.
What I have done for the music is to have a dedicated drive on my desktop for the music and then to use aliases to it from my other drives. So when I launch iTunes on my powerbook it will automatically mount the other drive and load my iTunes library from my desktop. Sync no longer needed. I’m quite sure the same thing could be done with iPhoto.
Michael Saji
on 17 Feb 08Have you tried Martian Slingshot? It’s a dead-easy Bonjour-enabled folder synchronizer… it works great when you have a laptop and an always-on desktop, since the desktop can sit around waiting for your laptop to show up, and sync you automatically when you do.
Less than ideal for i-Apps though, since it only syncs on a folder level. Someone should make a program that does this! :)
Michael Saji
on 17 Feb 08I stand corrected—it does sync iTunes playlists! http://www.martian.com/SlingShot.html
Jed Christiansen
on 19 Feb 08For those of us that are forced to work on Windows machines, I’ve found Plaxo to be a great syncing tool. While the interface can be very crude in places, the service it provides is outstanding. I am able to sync contacts and calendars for my WindowsXP work laptop, Mac mini home computer and MacBook laptop very efficiently. I make a change to my work calendar, and I see it when I get home on that computer. Once I get my iPhone (live in the UK, waiting for the 3G version to take advantage of the network here) that will be fairly easy to integrate, as well.
I just wish my company would switch to all Macs, but I know it’ll never happen.
This discussion is closed.