mon petit blogue sans importance...

How do normal people sync their life between computers?

So i have a laptop and a desktop, like lots of people do. My desktop is great: large monitor, quadcore CPU, 8GB ram, RAID-1 hard drives with lots of space, wired connection. My laptop, a Lenovo x300, is also great but in different ways: it's very small and sturdy, and still kinda fast, but nowhere near the desktop. So i work on both frequently - even within a single day i'll work on both.

But i want my files to be accessible from both places easily, and synchronize them... But not all of them. And particularly not the hg /svn/cvs/bzr/whatever sandboxes: for those, i want to use normal DVCS flows, and if i need to move in-flight work i'll use mq patches.

So what i came up with is this:

• i'll only sync stuff within a "work" directory
• within that work directory, i made a subdir "old stuff", where i put really old files i rarely need anymore; this i don't want to sync, and it resides on the desktop
• i created a VC (as in "version-controlled") dir, where i put all my repos and sandboxes; this won't get sync'd
• i created a "sync" directory, where i moved all of my current directories (i did a major cleanup in the process, moving all my old stuff to "old stuff")
• i link the stuff from "sync" and "VC" back into the work directory so that it roughly looks like before
• some of the directories in "sync" will have a sandbox in them: i move it to VC and link it from here
• i then use unison to synchronize the sync directory between the 2 computers
• also, i lied: i sync directories outside of the work directory, namely my Pidgin, GTG and Skype directories, so that my contacts and logs and todo items are in sync
• For emails, it's all IMAP, so i don't sync that
• Finally, i don't sync my pictures, videos, and other such items - that's just too much for my laptop to store or process -; this is just for "working directories".

I can't possibly think this is what normal people do. Then again, normal people don't use mercurial. But let's say normal techies who do code - what do you do?

I'm not worried about backups, here; i use wisbak to back up all the machines nightly, including the laptop; this synchronization is so that if i'm on my laptop and work on a document, it'll end up on the desktop for editing later on. Or if i scan something onto my desktop, i'll see it from my laptop as well.

Also, what do normal people do on windows? My mom also has a laptop and a desktop, and i'm thinking that getting all her stuff synchronized would be both convenient and a good way to guard against hard disk failure (i setup automated backups as well, but they do have to have that drive plugged-in for them to run). Is there a nice little piece of software that'll just "keep shit the same" on both computers???

by wiswaud on 11 February 2010
Tags: english, geeky, linux