{"id":1000092,"date":"2006-07-18T08:42:05","date_gmt":"2006-07-18T13:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2006\/07\/18\/syncing-powerbooks\/"},"modified":"2006-09-07T13:48:10","modified_gmt":"2006-09-07T18:48:10","slug":"syncing-powerbooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2006\/07\/18\/syncing-powerbooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Syncing PowerBooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

It sometimes amazing to me the products that don’t exist. All I’m looking for is a simple<\/em> program that will allow me to bidirectionally sync my desktop Mac to my PowerBook over the network while excluding a few large folders. My PowerBook drive is quite a bit smaller than my desktop drive and I don’t want to carry around my entire music library. Near as I can tell there is nothing<\/em> out there that will do this.
\n<\/p>\n

Apple has completely blown this. They only support synchronization if you subscribe to .Mac, and then only for some of your files that support their custom iSync API. (In the old days Apple bundled a program to do this with every PowerBook.) There are several other products based on iSync that don’t require a .Mac subscription, but they still only support certain file types. For instance, you can synchronize your calendars and contacts, but not your source code. This is essentially worthless to me.<\/p>\n

There are a number of Unix utilities based on rsync that try something like this, but most of them don’t grok the Mac’s file system. RSyncX claims to, but it seems to be abandoned and buggy to boot. <\/p>\n

They’re a few payware alternatives such as Chronosync. However they’re based on rules for including and excluding. While I can see the usefulness of rules, that’s not what I want. All I need is to say sync everything except for a few particular folders that I specify. That’s it. I can probably figure out how to make Chronosync do this; but it sure isn’t obvious, because of their complex, rule-based interface. <\/p>\n

Isn’t there something else out there? Can’t someone meet this need? I am willing to pay for a program that does what I need and works reliably. My wallet is open. Who wants my money? <\/p>\n

Update<\/h2>\n

I think I’ve figured out how to make Chronosync do this, but you have to go into their most advanced interface, even though this should be one of the simplest options. Weirdly, including a folder is part of the intermediate options, but excluding it is only available in the advanced interface. Furthermore you have to understand Unix programmer concepts like “paths” rather than just choosing a folder to exclude with a standard file dialog. A normal user could never figure this out (but maybe normal users aren’t supposed to have two computers?). <\/p>\n

Update to the Update<\/h2>\n

Apparently the exclude by parent path option doesn’t do what I thought it did since when I tried to run the sync, it went right ahead and started copying some of the songs from my ~\/Music folder I thought I’d excluded. Possibly when it says “parent directory” it only means immediate parent?<\/p>\n

However, I have now discovered that you can individually exclude folders by manually checking them from the Analyze panel. This is far from obvious but it does work. The next question is whether Chronosync is fast enough to be used. Right now the answer is leaning toward no, but more on that in the next post. <\/p>\n

Aren’t Macs supposed to be easy? I can only imagine what somebody who wants to sync their Windows desktop to a PowerBook has to go through. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It sometimes amazing to me the products that don’t exist. All I’m looking for is a simple program that will allow me to bidirectionally sync my desktop Mac to my PowerBook over the network while excluding a few large folders. My PowerBook drive is quite a bit smaller than my desktop drive and I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}