Keeping it all in Sync

I’m on the road a lot and have often found it quite time consuming to keep my laptop data in sync with my data on my desktop at home.

There are several types of data I want to keep in sync. This includes:

Data in my Home Directory (Documents, spreadsheets, etc)
Email
Email Rules
Calendar
Bookmarks
OS X Leopard Dock Items
Address Book
Notes
OS X Preferences
Dashboard Widgets
Keychains

Essentially I want my laptop and desktop to be identical. When I am at home, I will mostly work on my MacPro desktop computer. Before I leave town, I will like to have my Macbook Pro in sync with my desktop. When I get back home, I want to sync desktop back up from my laptop.

You can see how this can be a time consuming process.

I subscribe to Apple’s Dot Mac (.mac) service. This allows me to sync a lot of my system settings, such as my dock, widgets, bookmarks, etc. In addition, I also sync my Mail, Calendar and Address Book. One note on my Mail account, I set up folders on the server with rules, so all my email is saved on the mail server. So not matter what machine I am using, I always have a consistent view of all my mail messages.

As for my general data synchronization, I use a program called File Synchronization (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/filesynchronization.html)

This is a very simple, robust, point and click program to sync folders. I have a shared folder on my desktop that I can mount on my laptop. In the program, I set up a Sync Pair with these two folders. Its pretty cool.

So basically, no matter where I am, or what computer I am using, everything is identical.