Dear Lifehacker, We live in a world with multiple computers for one person, but I am having one issue. How can we keep everything in sync? I would like to work on my Mac at home. Close it, go to work and open my (different) Mac at work. I want the same configuration (yes, I do have some tendencies…), same files, same everything where I left off at home. Any suggestions? Thanks, Lost In Sync
Dear LIS,
Some parts of what you want to do should be quite simple, as long as all the Macs you’re using have relatively persistent Internet connections, thanks to the wonders of the cloud.
Apple would probably prefer that you use iCloud for this purpose, but you’re equally free to use other providers such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive or any other cloud provider. Simply save whatever you’re working on in a cloud-connected drive and it’ll be available on any Mac that you’ve authorised to sync that folder.
Getting your preferences and settings across is a trickier prospect. You could use a utility like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full backup of your existing Mac and clone that to the machines you want to be identical, but that’s a fairly nuclear option, and it strikes me depending on who else is using those Macs, it might not be a popular one either.
It may just be easier to set up your login on each machine and manually configure it to your taste. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to synchronise matters such that if you made a configuration change to one Mac, it would appear on others.
Any Lifehacker readers running banks of synced Macs with tips to share?
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