I have an iBook G4 (of which I am the exclusive user), a Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) that my wife and son use, and a new iMac Core 2 Duo, which all three of us use. My question is, to keep the user experience, documents, the same regardless of which machine any one of us is using at a particular time, is it better to
- Use rsync or similar utility to keep all of the various user directories in sync (which would mean maintaining three duplicates of my home folder and two duplicates each of my wife's and my son's), or;
- Keep the user directories on the iMac (which has by far the largest hard drive and the greatest processor speed, plus it's always powered on), and link the user directories on the other machines' hard drives to the ones on the iMac's hard drive using either aliases or symbolic links?
The former plan certainly takes up a lot of hard drive space (although come to think of it, this in essence creates a fairly decent backup system!); on the other hand, I worry that the latter plan may result in really crummy performance over our network (currently wireless, soon to be wired).
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