Blog buddy and 43 Folders proprietor Merlin Mann has issued…a throwdown, asking his users: how do you keep your two (or more) Macs in sync? Now, we sincerely believe that Merlin does not intend to use this for merely his own personal gratification, and are convinced that he wants to unearth this sacred knowledge for the good of all mankind. Merlin’s looking for something a little more than just .Mac: a robust solution that will intelligently sync application settings, make backups easy, and provide offline access. I suspect this solution does exist, but it’s likely been hammered into a wooden crate and left in a warehouse somewhere near the Ark.
Seriously, it’s an excellent question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with lately. I own two Macs: my MacBook, which is my primary machine, and an aging PowerMac, which serves as my vault. I keep my photos, music, and a huge backlog of documents on the PowerMac, which is backed up to an external HD, and try to keep as little non-redundant data on the MacBook as possible. Most of my documents live on my iDisk, which gives me essentially three copies, one on Apple’s server, and one on each computer. But lately, I’ve been using the PowerMac less and less, and I find it annoying to have to boot it up to sync my iPod with my full library, or access some pictures. It occurs to me that I need something more like a centralized storage solution to keep my iTunes and iPhoto data, so that I could access it from multiple computers if need be. I think the answer in my case is some sort of Network Attached Storage (NAS) with a RAID, but I haven’t investigated all the possibilities yet.
Anyway, if you’ve got a solution for Merlin (and me!), head over to 43 Folders and let fly.
