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ph0ust · Nov 12, 2008, 02:30 PM

hi all. i'm a consultant. i work on my 24" imac when working from home and on my laptop when i am onsite. that means that i end up having files for work on both machines. i try to keep them in sync manually, but it is totally untenable. i know mobile me will auto-sync my calendar, contacts and backup my documents, but i need something that will auto-sync my documents folder so that when i create or edit a file on ony machine it is replicated on the other. basically, i want two machines with a replicated documents folder.

is there such a thing? i haven't been able to find anything that does this specifically other than dropbox. unfortunately, dropbox does it in the dropbox folder.... i want it for my documents folder and i want it to be transparent. any ideas? thanks.

Big Mac · Nov 12, 2008, 02:48 PM

There are a few utilities you can use, but ChronoSync seems to be one of the best.

larkost · Nov 12, 2008, 03:38 PM

Unison is another one to try. Despite what it says on the web page there is some active development going on (just not by the original author):

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

ph0ust · Nov 12, 2008, 04:02 PM

cool. chronosync looks like it does the job. i'll check out unison.

i take it mobile me does not do this, correct?

thanks for the recommendations!

jaydon34 · Nov 12, 2008, 04:33 PM

try http://box.net/ they give 2 gigs of free storage and they sync to the web.

ph0ust · Nov 12, 2008, 05:15 PM

i actually have a box.net account for linkedin. they do the type of file syncronization i am looking for? i didn't see anything like that. am i missing something?

mduell · Nov 12, 2008, 08:38 PM

Dropbox allows you to use an arbitrary folder, so you could just point it to your Documents folder if you don't want to go the symlink route.

What's nice about a hosted product like Dropbox compared to others (FolderShare, Chronosync, etc) is that it just works from anywhere you can get to the web. No worrying about network configuration and upstream devices you have no control over doing NAT, etc.

~ a very happy Dropbox user

ph0ust · Nov 13, 2008, 01:36 AM

sweet! i was looking for a reason to try dropbox.

question though: upon installation it created the 'dropbox' folder. i pointed it to my 'documents' folder, but it just put the new 'dropbox' folder in there. that doesn't get all of my documents into the dropbox folder. so then i tried moving it to another directory and making an alias for my documents folder, but that didn't seem to do anything other than put the alias folder in the dropbox folder (i.e. no files from the documents folder at all).

how did you get that to work exactly? sorry for the dumb questions. thanks!

ph0ust · Nov 13, 2008, 11:31 AM

looks like the symlink route is the only way to get this done. i'll give that a shot today. thanks for your suggestion mduell!

IronPen · Nov 13, 2008, 04:34 PM

ChronoSync is nice, having used it before I can vouch for it being a good app. But it isn't free and there are other apps to do this sort of thing. I have used Synchronize Folder and it does a nice job, or there is SyncTwoFolders, both of which are free.

If you are not afraid of the Terminal, rsync is a great unix synchronization tool (it's actually probably what is behind some of the aforementioned apps). It's worth spending a little time learning. But basically, here is what I do...

rsync -tvurl ~/Documents/ /Volumes/username/Documents/

Include the trailing slashes on each path. I like the 'tvurl' options because it's easy to remember, but what they do (in order), preserve time, give verbose output, update only (so only update parts of the file that have changed, which is why rsync is so fast and effecient), recursive update (so it goes into subfolders in the directory too, and the 'l' is for links, so this is great if you have softlinks in your directories. I sometimes leave it off.

I understand the Terminal isn't for everyone, but I thought I would share another way to do it without having to use additional apps. And you could make this even simpler by creating aliases in your ~/.bash_profile so that all you have to do is open the Terminal and issue your command, like mb2imac or imac2mb.

workerbee · Nov 16, 2008, 07:20 AM

Sugarsync would appear to be another contender; Walt Mossberg had a positive review of it.
I'm in the middle of planning a switch from 1 MBP as main/only computer to MP or iMac plus MBP or MBA for mobile access, so I also have a lot of interest in this (but too little time to actually test much of it lately).