Owning two Macs: and making them look the same

Question

Level 1

0 points

Owning two Macs: and making them look the same

I have an iMac intel with Leopard 10.5.4. It is my main home computer and on it I have a mass of media in iTunes, i Photo.

I want to buy a Macbook Pro soon but am concerned at how I get the two computers to hold the same music files and photos as I will want to make extensive use of these on the move, sometimes without an internet connection (offline).

1; Can i tunes look the same on the portable as the iMac? ie can I synch my iPod with the portable, buy and manage files. make playlists etc on the portable and when it is connected back to the iMac have it all synch'd up

2; similarly for photos taken on the go and downloaded to the portable, how do they synch up with the iMac on return to home.

I guess people will say use i disk and or MobileMe to keep both machines constantly in synch. I understand that but fundamentally I am concerned at the expensive Macbook Pro being just a poor relation of the master and not holding 'title' to its media files which is an issue for me when I may be using the portable for many weeks at a time not being able to return to the home for the iMac or even to keep it running whilst I am away from home.
Thanks for any comments, Paul.

iMac 17", Mac OS X (10.5.4), Intel

Posted on Aug 27, 2008 5:25 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Aug 27, 2008 7:32 AM in response to PMC55

For (1), since the iMac is desk-bound, it will always be on your home network (not traveling with you). Therefore, you can keep your main music collection on your MacBook Pro. Then, use the iTunes Sharing feature to share your music library on your MacBook Pro while using the iMac. You set up this sharing feature in iTunes preferences Sharing pane. You will see the exact same library on the MacBook Pro and in the SHARED section of the iMac's iTunes sidebar, because they are the same library; no syncing is required.

(You cannot use an iPod to sync up two libraries on two computers. An iPod can only be synced to one Mac at a time, and the sync goes from Mac to iPod, not iPod to Mac.)

For (2), mount your user folder from the MacBook Pro as a network volume on the iMac. Then, you will have access to your photos (as well as all other personal files) on the iMac when you are at home. Again, you are accessing the same data, so no syncing is required in either direction.

The only disadvantage is that you will have to keep you MacBook Pro powered up and connected to the home network when using the iMac. However, the huge advantage is that there is actually only one main repository of data (on the MacBook Pro), and you don't need to worry about keeping two sets of data in sync.

As a precaution, you can periodically back up your MacBook Pro's hard drive (or at least your user folder with your personal data) as a disk image and store the disk image file on your iMac's hard drive (or an external drive attached to the iMac). You can do so over the network or by putting the MacBook Pro into FireWire target disk mode.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

Then, the backup disk image can be mounted if you need access to those files on the iMac when the MacBook Pro is not available.

ALTERNATIVE - If you do want to keep your repository of data on both the Macs and keep them in sync, here is one great way to do it. Get this program, ChronoSync.

http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html

You tell it to keep two folders exactly in sync, in both directions. So for iTunes, tell it to keep your iTunes folder (inside your Music folder) on your iMac and MacBook Pro in sync. You can run the sync operation when you have both Macs on your home network. If you run it from the iMac, your MacBook Pro user folder would be mounted as a network volume on the iMac. I used to run this routine between my home iMac and a work laptop to keep a "work" folder in sync on the two computers (and the laptop was Windows!). It would sync in both directions. If there was a file that was modified on both computers since the last sync, it would pause and ask me which one I wanted to keep (with the option not to sync that particular file). For $30, you can't beat it.

Reply