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I am feeling (slightly) the urge toward a desktop Mac to complement the lappytop and the game machine. It'd be nice to have a Mac with a ton of storage, and to be able to sync my laptop to it. I'm not sure if there's software to do sort of live syncing of applications and home directory at once... It'd be nice if there was something that would treat a laptop as sort of a ridiculously large PDA...

I suppose there's always rsync... Hm. Or Carbon Copy Cloner? Anyone seen software like this? Maybe I'll bug one of the Mac news sites, but I don't want to start some kind of ridiculous and tedious exchange of annoying user letters on Macintouch or anything.

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From:

artan

I've used Carbon Copy Cloner quite often. It works well, and can create full bootable images or just back up a few things. It can also be set up to work on a schedule. I haven't played with all it's capabilities, but is can also work with Apple remote desktop. I'd guess that between the two you could get scheduled backup of any folders via a network. The original idea is to go the other way (network restores) but it could be turned around.

I usually boot to firewire disk mode and use that though. The only problem there is that the laptop must get shut down/rebooted. This sort of treats it much like a palm though, since they lock up all but syncing functions while in use.

From:

friode.livejournal.com

Perhaps you're trying to solve a slightly different problem than the one I'm thinking of, but if you edit data at random on both machines, it becomes difficult to make sure that merging doesn't end up losing some of your changes in some cases.

You might want to consider something like cvs or svn for your homedir, which tends to work great for dotfiles, and not so great if you need to have every single media file synced in an automated fashion.

From:

solipsistnation.livejournal.com

Yeah, this sounds like what I'm considering.

I'm not sure what the choice will be-- I really don't want ALL the media files transferred, though. I may have more music and stuff on the desktop than the laptop, for example.

I dunno. I'll probably end up doing most of it by hand, or writing some kind of ridiculous script of my own...

From:

laurion

Look into rsync. It should be able to do the two way synchronization you are looking for. I've used carbon copy cloner as well, but that's much better for making backups, or imaging multiple machines, or just transferring _everything_ from an old machine to a new.

From:

ninjarat.livejournal.com

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)
pro: Makes perfect, bootable copies of system disks to other disks.
con: Is very, very, very slow. At least, it seems that way to me.

RsyncX
pro: Copies resource forks (stock rsync does not). Is part of what lies underneath CCC.
con: Does not play nice if the target volume is not HFS/HFS+, for example on a remote Linux machine.

HELIOS xtar
pro: GNU tar modified to handle resource forks. Works with foreign filesystems. Plays nicely with other tar programs.
con: No "live" copy; backups must be restored to an HFS/HFS+ partition.

Apple Backup version 2
pro: "Free" with a .Mac subscription. Good UI.
con: .Mac costs $100/year (but I think is worth it for iDisk). Made for backing up stuff in your home directory, not entire systems. It should be able to make a complete backup. I will try it tonight.

I use xtar to do system backups, full weekly and more or less daily incrementals to a disk on my Linux machine at work. And I use Backup v2 to backup my home dir to my iPod when I feel like it.