firecat

I need to sync a few folders between a mac laptop and a mac desktop. What should I use?

I have a lot of storage available on my web hosting site. I am willing to shell out for .mac or mobileme or whatever the latest such thing is, if it's easy.

rsync has already been suggested. I could do it that way, but after looking at the man page, I decided I don't want to think that hard.

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From:

gconnor.livejournal.com

If you want a continuous/ongoing sync, I have had good luck with DropBox. It's a free service that keeps folders synchronized on multiple computers. I wouldn't want to use it for anything super-secret, or anything very big. (I actually use it for my password collection, which is pretty safe because the password program PasswordSafe3 only writes files in encrypted form.)

If it's big, and you want to have some control over the process, rsync really is the best. The man page is intimidating, but skip down to where the examples are and there's some useful stuff there. Most often I use it like this:
rsync -e ssh /home/gconnor/whatever/ gconnor@hostname:/home/gconnor/whatever/

which basically means to sync from the local folder to the remote folder on "hostname" using ssh to connect and using gconnor as the username. The only thing that really trips me up sometimes and I have to be cautious of, is the / on the end... just be consistent on the source and destination so they both have the slash, otherwise you might end up with a folder-within-a-folder.

The upside to rsync is that you have more control, and you aren't trusting a third party like DropBox to carry and hold your data.

I have to admit that I haven't tried .mac/mobileme for its folder sync features... I use it for contacts, calendar, everything else but actual files. I am actually not sure if it has a feature to sync folders, or if it just offers some storage that's available from multiple locations. I'll be interested to see if someone else chimes in with more info about that.

From:

ckd

The iDisk is sort of both. You can set it up to keep a local copy (especially on a laptop) that it will automatically sync with MobileMe, or just use it online.

That said, I haven't really done anything with it, so I don't know how well it works!

From:

klwalton.livejournal.com

Don't know how much you want to sync/backup, but I use Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/home#/), and really love it.

From:

kwamee.livejournal.com

+1 on Dropbox!

They just sent me some news about an update that will be helpful to you:

Performance Improvements and LAN Sync
In addition to the iPhone app, we're also finishing up a new version of the Dropbox desktop software that features numerous performance improvements and our new "LAN sync" feature. LAN sync knows when Dropboxes are on the same network and will automatically exchange files directly between computers instead of downloading them from our servers - this makes sharing large files in an office environment much faster than was previously possible.