Sync laptop and desktop?

[Jonathan H]

What's the best way to keep my laptop sync'ed with my desktop? The DT sees 90% of my computing, but after a weekend on the road, a vacation w/ photos backed up to the LT, etc, I've often got substantial system differences.

Is just smart updating back and forth the way to go about this? What if my desktop is a brand new intel mac pro and my laptop is an older G4 powerbook - would I need to upgrade to a newer Intel-based laptop?

[dnanian]

We're not really designed to do this, actually, and you certainly can't do it with a Power PC and Intel Mac.

If you really wanted to literally make the two Macs identical, you could do so by doing a Smart Update of one to the other in Target disk mode. But I'm not sure it's a good thing to do... easy to make mistakes.

[jofallon]

I do something like this, usually just my documents folder, with Chronosync (there are plenty of other programs like it). I've done it with my whole user folder, but it strikes me that some preferences might be incompatible between the universal binary and PPC versions of the same software. But for things like photos and documents it should work well enough.

[mikebore]

I do it by putting everything I want to be the same on the two comps in a folder I call Synchrodocs in my User folder. It is currently about 50Gb. I use Chronosync to do bidirectional synchronisation, so both machines end up with the latest version of all files. If you have changed something on both machines since the last run, Chronosync will ask you which you want to use. This will work between PPC and Intel machines. Agree with comment about not syncing prefs.

There are also ways of keeping mail the same between the two, but it is more complicated. If you are interested I will do a follow up post or pm me.

Mike