alright Mac experts

[JodyH]

Paging Mac experts.
I have a Mini and a Air.
I use the Mini at home and the Air everywhere else.
I want to clone them and have them automatically sync/clone over my WiFi.
Basically I want them to be identical twins pretty much all the time.
Can it be done?
What will do it?

[LittleLebowski]

Why not just sync your important stuff to a Dropbox or the like account? I suppose it can be done if you learn shell scripting and rsync (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync) or find a commercial utility but.......I don't get it. Your music/movies can be streamed, documents are trivial to store to a Dropbox, what else do you need? It's not like your mail isn't in the cloud.

[Hatchetman]

Define "everything." Docs? Porn? Bookmarks? Plists? Web history?

Simplest solution for a lot of stuff is to get an iCloud account for 40 bucks a year, IIRC. It'll keep your bookmarks, contacts, email accounts, calendars, widgets, system settings, photos, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting synced across all Macs you touch.

Dropbox is also a possibility. I don't use it much, but know others who have set up synced folders across several Macs.

Suspect if you screwed around with Time Machine you could set something up, but that would likely require a lot of farting around.

No experience with it, but there is an ap that claims to accomplish what you want: http://www.markspace.com/synctogether/index.html

Again, it all boils down to just how identical you want the two hard drives to be.


ETA: scoped out some Mac forums; one had some interesting advice as long as you are comfortable in Terminal:

You can use Dropbox and symbolic links. I have both of my macs syncing the Desktop, Documents, Pictures and Music folders setup like this. As stated, you will need enough room on your Dropbox account to allow that however, I purchased the 50GB and may even need to upgrade to 100GB at some stage.

It works quite well.. I create a new file on my desktop, and within seconds it is replicated on the other Mac. I delete it, and it dissappears just as quick.

In order to setup symlinks, you will need to do the following:

1) Pause dropbox syncing on both computers
2) Open terminal on both computers and configure the same symlinks
3) Un-pause dropbox syncing on both computers

Symlinks example (off the top of my head, you may need to research further):

ln -s /Users/Username/Folder /Users/Username/Dropbox/Folder

EG: ln -s /Users/eliehass/Desktop /Users/eliehass/Dropbox/Desktop

I would test it one folder at a time so that you know whats going on, start with your desktop for example (take a backup of it first in case). Also be aware of how long it will take to upload GBs of data to Dropbox.. mine took a few days to complete the first initial sync (uploading to Dropbox) - LANsync feature enables quick download speeds however to sync files locally (it will still goto the Dropbox cloud however).

Be ware though... If you enable this on your iTunes folder you can only have ONE copy of iTunes open at any time on your Macs.. the process would be to close iTunes, wait for Dropbox to sync the XML library files on both computers before opening iTunes on the other Mac. I also wouldn't be using this to sync Library or System folders.. I havn't tested that as I only use it for replication of personal data not system/application data, so I wouldn't know if that would work or not!

[gtmtnbiker98]

iCloud for Calendar, Contacts, Music, and if you use Pages, Keynote, and Numbers iCould can sync all of it including your purchased iTunes. 5 GB of data comes free and you can buy additional storage if needed. If you are an Office user, use Google drive, it is as simple as a folder in your Finder and synchronization is seamless.