Fun with Leopard
(Leopard is a strange looking word. It looks so much like leotard that I want to pronounce it LEE-oh-pard)
It’s kind of surprising how much Apple junk I have now, considering that I’m a Windows programmer. A quick review of the Apple products I have owned over the past few years:
Macbook 13"
iMac 24"
4 iPods – nano 1st gen / nano 2nd gen / nano 3rd gen / iPod Touch 8GB
Airport Express, with the over-hyped 802.11n*
Various accessories, multiple keyboards and mice including both Bluetooth and USB versions
<this space reserved for 3G iPhone>
One real pain is that I now have 4 operating systems running on any given day; Tiger + WinXP on the Macbook and Leotard + WinXP on the iMac. Keeping them all synchronized and not losing track of data is getting to be a bit of a problem. I had a quick google for synchronizing tools and tried Chronosync briefly, until it informed me it was so badly crippled that I would have to buy it before I could even decide if I wanted it… so screw you, Chronosync, you just lost a customer by acting like some asshole software vendor from 1995.
I’d love to use the built-in rsync command but unfortunately I only have a genius level IQ so am not confident enough to try it without help. If someone who already uses it can point me at a simple example of how I can synchronize two home folders (ie the home folders on each Mac) which doesn’t involve tarballs or gcc I would greatly appreciate it.
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* I was glad when Apple updated the Airport Express to include the latest protocol, but to be honest I hardly notice any speed improvement over my generic Netgear 802.11g router. Also it appears the audio-out feature only seems to be available in iTunes and not FrontRow (even when playing music). I believe there is software out there to enable Airtunes as a generic sound device, but installing miscellaneous third party apps is a hobby I have grown out of– JUST WORK DAMN YOU! Also also there is no way to tie Airtunes volume to system volume, so I can’t use the Apple remote to adjust volume when playing music, which means fiddling about with two remotes (and this is particularly painful when using multiple speaker mode, since the levels on the iMac and Airport Express really should be linked for this).
Attach NAS to your LAN – store your data there? Haven’t tried this myself yet, maybe when I have gigabit networking.
NAS would be good, but I still want to use both Home folders including when I’m in another location… I just need someway to keep them up to date without having to think about it
Since you’re a software developer, perhaps try Git. It’s all about syncing directories up, plus you get version control goodies.
But if you’re getting a iPhone 3G and can swing the MobileMe yearly fee, that may be an attractive option as well.
Hmmm… I might have to try Git based on the name alone ;-)
I bought a D-Link NAS unit (DNS323) – mainly because it’s linux and hackable. I set up the rsync server on it and have as simple cron job to backup stuff like my MP3s (a timely decision since the HDD containing them died and I spent 12 hours solid restoring from the backup).
Anyway – the basis is `rsync -avp ` to copy everything with file permissions preserved, in verbose mode.
is a directory, and is something like user@host:dest ie. mark@targetmachine:/home/mark
1/2 an hour of mucking around to get it working should be all you need. I can help with more specifics and questions, if you like.
hmmm. half the command got swallowed – I actually said something like `rsync -avp SRC DEST` were SRC is a directory and DEST is the user@….
thanks Eric, sorry about my blog mangling your comments (one of these days I’m going to ditch WordPress). I’ll have a go this weekend and see how I go :)
syncing is confusing with rsync. i’d be going one way myself.
See p158 of fix a troubled mac, which covers how to rsync over the network using SSH, and Launchd.
It needs a little updating but should work in 10.5 as well.
i’ve found this program that might just do what you need, with a 30 days trial too. Pro version :)
http://www.decimus.net/synk_professional.php
Ta, I will have a go (still doing sync manually for now)