Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Automate Mac-to-Mac Syncing
Do you use two or more Macs regularly? If not, skip ahead to the next chapter. But if you do,
you may find it useful to keep some or all of the data in sync between Macs. I can say from
experience that it's
far
better to automate this process than to do it manually!
I suggest thinking through two main questions:
First, is it desirable (or even possible) to keep
all
your personal files in sync between two
Macs?
If you have a Mac Pro with 4 TB of storage and a MacBook Air with 128 GB, the answer is
clearly no. Even if all your Macs have enough space for all your files, you may not need or
want to have all of them everywhere. So, if the answer to this question is
no
, you'll have to
figure out which subset of files to keep in sync. All things being equal, it's easiest if you can
segregate all those files into a single folder or a small number of folders.
You'll notice, by the way, that I said
personal
files. You should never, ever try to sync
all
files between two Macs—in particular, stay far away from the top-level
/System
,
/Library
,
and
/Application
folders, as well as any hidden folders. Attempting to sync any of those
can lead to serious data corruption, including an inability to boot your Mac. So whatever you
choose to sync, make sure it's not part of OS X itself.
Second, is it desirable (or even possible) to use a cloud service to sync files between your
Macs?
I'lluseDropboxasanexample.Ifitturnedoutthatyouhad80GBofdatayouwantedtokeep
in syncbetween two(ormore) Macs, youcouldpurchase 100 GBofstorage from Dropbox for
$99 a year. Install Dropbox on your Macs, make sure all the files you want to sync are in your
Dropbox folder, wait for that initial upload to finish, and…you're done. You never have to run
sync software or take any other manual action; file changes propagate almost instantly. As a
bonus, the files in your Dropbox are also available on your mobile devices, and can be shared
easily with others.
What's true of Dropbox is also true of numerous competing services—
Amazon Cloud Drive
,
Bitcasa
,
Box
,
Google Drive
,
Microsoft OneDrive
,
SpiderOak
,
SugarSync
,
and many more.
They each have their own features, benefits, and pricing, and you may prefer one over the
others for any number of reasons. But they all can perform the essential task of syncing the
contents of one or more folders across Macs, automatically.