Two Macs running different OS - Snow Leopard vs Lion/mountain lion - backup compatibility.

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See > http://pondini.org/TM/Clones.html

Avoid Time Machine, it isn't intended for your use case.

SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner will allow you to create full copies of data to other disks, but you may need syncing in two directions if you plan to modify the files on the road & merge those changes back into the original disk.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

http://www.bombich.com/

ChronoSync can do two way syncing, be careful you can ruin both sets of data with a mistake during a sync.

http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html

I don't know how much data you have, Dropbox may be a solution, it has 30 day revert or longer if you pay for more storage. https://www.dropbox.com/home Dropbox is seamless once you have the files uploaded.

Have you got Freehand installed on the Macbook Pro? I thought it was a PowerPC app, and Lion removed the ability to run PPC applications via Rosetta. You would need to revert the MBP to 10.6.8 if it can run that OS, Mactracker.ca will tell you what OS's the model can run.

Here is a post that I assembled for another who needed to continue to run his PowerPC applications in Lion/Mt. Lion:

Unfortunately you got caught up in the minor miracle of Rosetta. Originally licensed by Apple when it migrated from the PowerPC CPU platform that it had used from the mid-1990's until the Intel CPU platform in 2006, Rosetta allowed Mac users to continue to use their library of PPC software transparently in emulation.

However, Apple's license to continue to use this technology expired with new releases of OS X commencing with Lion (and now Mountain Lion). While educational efforts have been made over the last 6 years, the fact is that Rosetta was SO successful that many users were caught unaware UNTIL they upgraded to Lion or Mountain Lion.

Workarounds:

1. If your Mac will support it, restore OS X Snow Leopard;

2. If your Mac will support it, partition your hard drive or add an external hard drive and install Snow Leopard into it and use the "dual-boot" method to choose between your PowerPC software or Lion/Mt. Lion;

3. Upgrade your software to Intel compatible versions, or find alternative software that will open your data files;

3. Install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels:

[click on image to enlarge]

Full Snow Leopard installation instructions here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

NOTE: STEP ONE of the instructions must currently be completed on a Snow Leopard or Lion Mac and the resulting modified Snow Leopard.cdr install file can then be moved over to your Mountain Lion Mac for completion of the remaining steps.

NOTE 2: Computer games with complex, 3D or fast motion graphics make not work well or at all in virtualization.

Will you have enough disk space on the Macbook Pro for your work, a boot camp partition, 10.6 & 10.8? That sounds like a lot to deal with, I think you would install 10.8 first so it can create the hidden recovery partition. An portable USB or Firewire drive may be an option for the work or a 10.6 install.

Bear in mind Time Machine would need to backup eack of these disks if you need to keep these files safe.

Roy53 wrote:

I am favouring the idea of using boot camp to install Mountain Lion and Snow leapord on both my Mac Pro tower and Mac Pro laptop as you have suggested. I have been told I could then boot up into Snow Leopard whenever I wanted to use my Power PC applications, but still use Mountain Lion and time machine to create two Time machine back up hard drives - one on my Time Capsule and one on my portable back-up drive. That way I can synchonize both machines I think. Your thoughts on this?

It sounds like you are hoping to use Time Machine to move data around the two systems, is that correct?

Time Machine is intended to backup, restore & keep file history (for as long as disk space allows). As such it isn't intended to synchronize data to another Mac. You would have to manually open the Time Machine backup on each Mac & manually restore files onto the local disk. It's difficult to get a list of all the new files in a particular Time Machine backup if they are in multiple nested folders.

Each Mac also has it's own folder of storage within the Time Machine disk, so you would have 2 copies of each Mac to deal with (& their file history). It is not really a good long term solution, and you never know when Apple will change something that could break your system - I think this system is outside how Apple expect it to be used - not a good sign.

Roy53 wrote:

Drew Reece comments also very helpful, but the comment "ChronoSync can do two way syncing, be careful you can ruin both sets of data with a mistake during a sync." scares the willies out of me. I don't need any aggravation with this. I am not a true computer geek - just want a reliable tool that I don't have to mess around with - the reason I have always used Apple products.

I didn't mean to scare you, but just warn you of the risks so you can make an informed decision about how to handle the data. Take steady and appropriate steps and it will be fine.

Can you afford to get another disk for the Mac Pro & does it have a free drive bay? I'm thinking you could duplicate all your work as it is now onto the new disk. Keep the old disk somewhere safe as a 'frozen backup', and maybe update that once or twice a year or whenever you feel it's needed.

You can use the new disk as the 'one true source' of your data. Set the Macbook Pro to connect to that Mac & sync a copy of the work onto the Macbook Pro for when you are roaming. When you return you would reconnect to the Mac Pro & move any new changes back to the 'one true source' disk.

Chronosync is a good solution for this IMO. It does have a lot of power so you can look at the changes that will be made before you apply them. It is worth downloading ChronoSync & trying with some small copies of files & folder as a test.

The 'one true source' disk could also be backed up in Time Machine if it is an internal disk in the Mac Pro. It would give you a layer of backup ontop of the 'frozen backup' copy.

The Macbook Pro could either connect by Target Disk mode (for fast FireWire transfer)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Or use file sharing over a local network (slower, especially if it is wifi)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1549?viewlocale=en_US

If both Macs have thier original hard disks they will be getting old, so having Time Machine & a single copy on a new disk give you extra protection. Keeping the 'frozen disk' at a trusted friend or relatives house will give you an offsite backup layer.

I know it is a lot to take in but mull it over & ask more questions 🙂 you need to get it right otherwise it gets can get messy.

I can give you info on some of the red flags when syncing files, but I think this is probably enough for one day?

P.S. check out Adobe's site for Freehand info.

http://www.adobe.com/products/freehand/ (spoiler: it's10.6 only)

Hopefully someone else can see a simpler solution. Can you say how much the actual work take up on disk? Is it all in one place?

The terminology of "boot camp" is a separate partition for which you can install and run Windows; it has no applicability to installing and running a second Mac OS X on your Mac.

Two of my suggestions are most applicable to your situation, since to the best of my knowledge, Freehand has no upgraded version that will operate in Lion, without Rosetta:

Partition your hard drive and install Snow Leopard into that partition. You can then "dual-boot" into Snow Leopard when you want to run Freehand, but will lose the ability to run Lion/Mt. Lion concurrently. Then you can boot back into Lion/Mt. Lion when you need those capabilities, but will not be able to run Freehand concurrently. Or:

Install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) as I suggested into Parallels. This method will allow concurrent use of both environments. Instead of a partition, this will create a Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file for use by Parallels, which will start at about 16GB and increase in size as you install more applications into Snow Leopard.

I always recommend that you store your Freehand data files in your Lion/Mt. Lion environment and not in the virtualized one, for best backup purposes.