Kastang Ramblings of a Geek

Prepping my Macs for College

I am writing this partially to help get in the "College" mindset and also to help a few friends who have recently gotten Macs that have been asking me for Application suggestions and help. This particular post will be concentrating on syncing data for those who have two or more Macs.

Here is my current situation. I have three Macs in use. An iMac(Primary Machine), a MacBook Pro(On the go Machine), and a PowerMac G5 (MAMP server, Backup Machine, base of command at my house). The MBP will be accompanying me to college every day for the next 4 or so years. The ultimate goal is to have everything automatically sync'd up is for saving time, and greatly reducing the chances of losing data incase of theft, hardware failure, etc.

The wonders of Mobile Me:
I am currently using MobileMe to sync my iCal, Address Book, Mail Accounts/Settings, Dock Items, Dashboard Widgets, and Transmit Favorites(My SFTP Client of choice, partially due to the fact of its great integration with the MobileMe service). I believe that MobileMe is almost a must for syncing data between macs. Mainly for the fact that it just works. It is integrated into many of OSX native applications. Also, as soon as you add a contact to Address Book, or add an event in iCal, it will automatically push that data to all your computers linked to your MobileMe account, it also stores that data on the MobileMe servers. This is a great thing to prevent data loss incase of a Hardware failure or theft.

I am not a huge fan of iDisk, mainly because it is slow compared to other services, (such as AFP/(S)FTP.. Which I have setup on my home box, but I plan to write another post with more details on that). I usually only use iDisk for saving small documents to it. Mainly Essays, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Pictures, etc. On Macs, its possible to save directly to iDisk which makes life very handy. Also, something everyone might not know is, when you save something to iDisk, it is stored locally on your hard drive and also automatically pushed to all other computers on your MobileMe account (also storing that file locally on the hard drive of the other computers. This means that you can access all your files offline, make changes and when you connect again to the internet, all modified files on iDisk will resync to all your other MobileMe computers.

Firefox:
Okay, so I haven't found a great way to fully sync Firefox yet, Cookies, History, Extensions, Bookmarks, etc. I currently use Foxmarks to sync my bookmarks from computer to computer. It works great! The good feature about Foxmarks is it allows me to sync with my MAMP server at my house. I haven't personally tried this yet, but I have heard good things about it. I am trying to get my hands on a Mozilla Weave alpha testing account. This seems like it is going to be the ideal way of syncing Firefox on multiple computers. Weave seems to be everything I am looking for, Cookie, Password, and Bookmark syncing for starters.

Okay, I think this is enough information for Part 1. I will cover more parts in Part 2 closer to college since I am still working on some of these things. Hope everyone enjoys. Does anyone have any more suggestions for syncing?