JulianSchrader.de

On Keeping Two Or More Macs In Sync

About a month ago I finally got the chance to satisfy a wish I had for a long time: I complemented my setup with a powerful machine from Apple’s Refurb Store.

My new main workstation is an 8-Core Mac Pro, featuring 2 × 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 6 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, one ½ TB harddisk and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card with 512 MB VRAM bringing some kick-ass graphics to my 30″ Cinema Display.

But enough of the boastful tech-blah for now.

I also have my (now) old machine here: My 17″ MacBook Pro is sitting on its Rain Design mStand in the corner of the desktop and serves as both a backup machine in case something goes wrong and the machine I’m using on-the-go: In lectures at the Uni or to get work done while I’m waiting for the next event, my iPhone unfortunately doesn’t kick it.

But there’s nothing as awful as booting up the MacBook Pro at the beginning of a 2-hour break on campus, ready to get some work done—only to notice that you forgot to copy the latest revision of your document or project you were going to work on over to the machine.

How to keep up-to-date

There’s a lot of stuff I wanted to sync between my machines:

• Calendars, Contacts, Mail
• Documents
• Passwords
• To-Dos (my Things library)
• Code and other project-related data

And there’s a default solution one has to think of when trying to sync multiple Macs:

MobileMe

We’re Mac users. And yes, there’s MobileMe—I have an account and wrote about it. MobileMe is great for syncing Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Rules, Signatures and Notes between multiple Macs and the iPhone—and not-so-great for syncing Keychains.

So MobileMe makes sure my Calendars, Contacts etc. are in sync among my Macs and iPhone.

Since there’s a ton of passwords and safe notes I need to access all the time, I’m using 1Password to handle it for me—it also has a client for iPhone. 1Passwords functionalities go far beyond Safari’s Auto-Fill, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a syncing mechanism right built-in.

Documents, Passwords & Notes, To-Dos: DropBox

Enter DropBox. Basically, it seems just the same as a feature .Mac already had and MobileMe has: iDisk.

DropBox syncs a specific folder on your system with its online counterpart—and as many other clients as you wish. But compared to iDisk, DropBox is blazingly fast.

Documents

All my important data such as notes from the Uni are stored in the DropBox folder to make sure I can work on them anytime I want. Documents are in sync.

Passwords

The new Agile Keychain format allows to save 1Password’s data to my DropBox, which syncs every change instantly to the other Mac where another 1Password install refreshes its database as soon as the file is changed. Works great!

To-Dos

As you may know from a previous post, I’m using Things to manage my To-Dos. Though it’s not yet officially supported by CulturedCode (the guys behind Things) it’s possible to sync Things’ library via DropBox as well.

But be careful: Don’t run Things on both machines at the same time! The application unfortunately does not refresh its database from the XML file as long as it’s running, so the Things copy you quit last will overwrite any data from other machines.

As long as you

1. quit Things on one machine,
2. wait a few seconds for DropBox to sync the file (you may want to enable Growl-Notifications with DropBox) and then
3. open Things on the other machine,

everything goes perfectly well—and you’re even able to sync Things Touch to both machines!

Code and other data

For all the projects I work on, the code is stored in subversion repositories. Subversion (SVN) makes it easy to handle the code on multiple machines as you’re constantly “checking in” new revisions of your project to the repository on the server—just hit “Update” on the other machine and you’re good to go!

A simple implementation to get you going with subversion is Versions and Beanstalk—just try it out for free!

For everything else I’m using an Amazon S3 account and Transmit to transfer the data. Transmit is able to sync directories, so this works—but there’s a good chance I’ll upgrade to a paid DropBox account which’ll give me 50 GB of storage so that Amazon S3 is more of an off-site archive for me.

Questions?

In case there are questions, just leave a comment below or shoot me an e-mail. I’ll gladly respond or craft another post on the topic.

How do you handle working on multiple machines? Let me and other readers know—thanks in advance!

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