Unison
There's a possibility that I might be able to get a new desktop Mac (most likely an iMac) at work, which would mean that a) I'd have a much faster machine for work (my G4 12" PowerBook is starting to show its age a little), b) I'd have a bigger screen, c) I'd mostly be able to leave my PowerBook at home for working in the evenings and weekends. Since I'm going to be commuting more by bike soon, not having to worry about my laptop bouncing about in a pannier will be quite welcome, not to mention lightening the load to haul quite a bit.
But that raises another problem -- synchronising the files on both
machines. I'm lucky enough to have 25 lovely GB of secure storage space
on Strongspace, so I'm thinking that I
might use that as a 'hub', and use
Unison to sync files to
and from my desktop and laptop to Strongspace. The idea would be that
I'd finish at work, unison
my files to Strongspace, go home, unison
those changed files to my laptop, work there, unison
the changes back
to Strongspace, and so on. One slight difficulty is that it seems that
the Strongspace servers no longer have Unison, but with Macfuse and
sshfs, I should be able to mount
Strongspace locally, run unison
on the local mount-point then unmount
when it's done.
I'm wondering if any of you clever and resourceful geeks out there have
any tips for using Unison with Mac OS X? I'm not going to sync
everything between the two machines, so I'll have to do some clean up
of my home directories so that I can partition what will and will not be
synced between the machines. That should be fairly easy for the main
folders in my home, but I would like to sync some files in ~/Library
,
which could be tricky. Has anyone got experience of using symlinks to
collect together specific files to sync? Are there issues, for example,
syncing mailboxes in ~/Library/Mail
(I use a mixture of POP and IMAP
accounts, and have quite a bit of mail in local mailboxes) or Yojimbo
databases between machines?