How do you keep all your files in sync on multiple platforms?
Like me, I expect several of you have multiple PCs, each with their own different OS installed. I'm investigating how to setup automatic synching between them. What I would ideally like is something that runs in the background and syncs (via peer-to-peer) the files automatically between Linux, OSX and Windows. I've found unison under a GPL license that supports all platforms, but it's only for merging two sources. I've found groove.net, but that's Windows only. Foldershare.com supports Mac and Windows, but not Linux and I don't like the idea of storing my own files externally. What I've done in the past is just have separate file stores on each machine and then sync them up to a master internal FTP server, but this sucks and is not time efficient when the same file ends up on more than one machine as I need to manually check for the most recent version. So, how do the rest of you handle synching your files on multiple platforms? -- Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. http://www.ashleyhowes.com/ "Oh, Great Spirit, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to tell the difference." - Native American Indian
On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 04:23:55PM +0100, Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. <lists@ashleyhowes.com> wrote:
Like me, I expect several of you have multiple PCs, each with their own different OS installed. I'm investigating how to setup automatic synching between them. What I would ideally like is something that runs in the background and syncs (via peer-to-peer) the files automatically between Linux, OSX and Windows.
I've found unison under a GPL license that supports all platforms, but it's only for merging two sources. I've found groove.net, but that's Windows only. Foldershare.com supports Mac and Windows, but not Linux and I don't like the idea of storing my own files externally.
What I've done in the past is just have separate file stores on each machine and then sync them up to a master internal FTP server, but this sucks and is not time efficient when the same file ends up on more than one machine as I need to manually check for the most recent version.
So, how do the rest of you handle synching your files on multiple platforms?
Generally, I only have my laptop, 3 web hosts, and my desktop to worry about, they all run linux though - and they have different tasks. At work we go with the simple "oh, look, there's a fileserver" approach, and use samba and NFS, then use those to keep everything in sync. All of my personal development work is done on my laptop, and then I use a tla mirror-archive command to copy it up to a web host other people can grab it from, has the other advantage that if I'm not near my laptop and can continue development (it's tla), and merge back in to the main repository later. At work we use svn for anything that we develop, so, again, a centralised service, don't have to worry about anything other than backing it up. Cheers, Brett.
On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 16:23 +0100, Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. wrote:
Like me, I expect several of you have multiple PCs, each with their own different OS installed. I'm investigating how to setup automatic synching between them. What I would ideally like is something that runs in the background and syncs (via peer-to-peer) the files automatically between Linux, OSX and Windows.
Do you need the machines to have access to the data when they are away from the network...If not then why not just put everything on a (well backed up) fileserver (which could be one of the existing machines). If you need off network access then you could probably set up something with rsync to maintain an offline copy, however it's hard to resolve conflicts with this setup should the file have changed at both ends between syncs. (actually with the Windows Machine you could just use the "make folder available offline" which works quite well but I am not so sure it works with Samba) Or you may need some sort of version control system (Like CVS, SVN etc) however that seems a bit excessive if only one person is working on a group of files.
participants (3)
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Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. -
Brett Parker -
Wayne Stallwood