I'm using both a PC and a Mac. As it stands, most of my files are on the PC purely because I have no easy way to synchronise them between the PC and the mac. What's the best software out there do to this?
You can write your own script to do it. With windows, write a batch command using xcopy. On the Mac, I guess you could use a shell script, not really sure how to do this. I've written a half dozen custom backup scripts using the xcopy and cdrecord features in dos, so its pretty easy to do, just look up the syntax. This requires mapped network drives tho.
You could install cygwin on the PC and then use the joy of rsync to sync the two machines:
(1) install cygwin with their nice gui installer; make sure the install includes cygrunsrv (under admin), and openssh and rsync (under net) (and possibly openssl, I'm not sure if there's a dependency there). Throw in vim as well, you know you want to.
(2) set up ssh on the windows PC: ssh-host-config -y will do it; if you want to run rsync from your mac rather than the other way around, you'll also have to turn on the ssh server: cygrunsrv -S sshd. Be aware that this will provide remote (authenticated) shell access to your machine. Conversely, if you're running from the PC, you'll have to turn on remote login in the sharing control panel on the mac.
(3) open a cygwin terminal (double click on their icon, or run it from the start menu) run rsync: rsync [[user@][host:]source] [[user@][host:]target]. By default, this will copy the directory named in the source to a directory on the target, only moving files which have changed/updated from the last time you did this. You can also set this up as a cron job to get it to run automatically at particular times of the day/week/month.
type man rsync at the terminal to see all the cool stuff it can do...
I'm sure there are GUI tools which also do this... there's one called Move2Mac, although I've never used it. Its more of a migration tool than a syncing tool, I think.
A quick Google also throws up Chronosync, which looks promising.
Comments
(1) install cygwin with their nice gui installer; make sure the install includes cygrunsrv (under admin), and openssh and rsync (under net) (and possibly openssl, I'm not sure if there's a dependency there). Throw in vim as well, you know you want to.
(2) set up ssh on the windows PC: ssh-host-config -y will do it; if you want to run rsync from your mac rather than the other way around, you'll also have to turn on the ssh server: cygrunsrv -S sshd. Be aware that this will provide remote (authenticated) shell access to your machine. Conversely, if you're running from the PC, you'll have to turn on remote login in the sharing control panel on the mac.
(3) open a cygwin terminal (double click on their icon, or run it from the start menu) run rsync: rsync [[user@][host:]source] [[user@][host:]target]. By default, this will copy the directory named in the source to a directory on the target, only moving files which have changed/updated from the last time you did this. You can also set this up as a cron job to get it to run automatically at particular times of the day/week/month.
type man rsync at the terminal to see all the cool stuff it can do...
I'm sure there are GUI tools which also do this... there's one called Move2Mac, although I've never used it. Its more of a migration tool than a syncing tool, I think.
A quick Google also throws up Chronosync, which looks promising.