Tip for keeping 2 PC's sync'ed
 

There's a free program by Microsoft called FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com)

It's simply a taskbar program that allows you to setup a directory or directories on both PC's and keep whatever you put in them up to date. As soon as you save a file on one PC, it gets sent to the other.

Only issue is you have to remember to close your files after a session.

Might help someone else here.. Also you should avoid massive files, for obvious reasons :)

Hi,

Welcome to 2001, only, this 'other' way works better..

nice idea. thanks

I presume it transfers and stores the files via the internet?

I've got a NAS box now, so in theory I could have the same desktop and set of documents on two computers simultaneously... although bad things would probably happen sooner or later :)

Isn't that for 2 PC's on the same network?

Yep, goes over the internet.

I prefer mapped network drives and dual bridged gigabit, all of my "work" things are on the linux box and I use samba to open them up to windows.

Doing anything over the internet isn't secure enough for me. If I'm going someplace I can just move the data to the laptop easy enough OR log into the home system from anywhere....

network hdd man, usb and network mountable., best thing i ever did.....

I decided on the reverse: rather than forcing 'nix to work with Windows, I forced Windows to work with 'nix. NFS, baby. :thumbsup

What storage setup are you running that can read/write at greater than the capacity of a single gigabit ethernet?

Good chunks of the reads are directly to/from the cache, so 1gbit isn't THAT fast...:2 cents:

haha ! :thumbsup

MS Office Groove does a great job on synching files between pc's over the internet

Yeah I really need to pickup one of those 2TB nas devices, raid it, and make it network accessible. However you'd still need to send things to it, remember to keep it updated etc. My application is between my office PC and my home PC, so internet is the *only* way to transfer, short of a thumb drive or something.. I like this because I know if I put something into my designated directory, it's going to be at my house in a matter of seconds as soon as I hit save. Easy to keep organized, just constantly keeps it mirrored.

My shared directory is 1.75gb and nearly 9,000 files, so I guess it's doing a pretty good job, I just make sure I mostly work with movies etc outside of that directory.

Aren't you concerned about storing your files on a third party site? Wouldn't it be better to find something you can run on one of your own servers?

I go dual more because I can than because I need to. just a couple years ago I said why would I need gigabit when 100Mb is fast enough?

Think of it like this: gigabit is plenty of bandwidth when you have 1 computer connecting to the storage but then when you have 2-3 using the storage it can get drained. Also I never said everything was on a single drive. I have 4 500Gb drives in that box simply because I haven't felt like paying the price premium on 1Tb drives (when the price drops more then I will but 6mnths ago it was dumb)

but it still comes down to I simply had an extra port and the motherboard has dual gigabit ports SOOO why not go dual?

BTW my files are using NFS and it is a linux box, I use samba to allow my windows machines to connect to this linux one. I'm starting to juggle files around while I wait for my 2 WD 640Gb drives to come and I setup a new machine with RAID for my main desktop. The quad core will remain int he file server/ encoding box while the E8400 goes into the main workstation.

Because HDs read and write faster than 10MB/sec? :) I connected up my wife's comp to the NFS share tonight and it's 100Mbps so it's sllllooowwwww

Fair enough. One reason I chose to build my own NAS box rather than use a canned one is that I can simply add more ethernet cards (and drives) if things start getting a little slow or crowded. Physically, it can hold 6 PCI or PCI express cards, and about 10 drives. I decided to use the second gigabit port in my 'doze workstation as a dedicated crossover to the NAS box rather than going via the switch. (Does gigabit bridging even work via a switch?) Even so it's not blindingly fast, probably about 30-35MBytes/sec. I'm happy with it because it's replacing a very unstable Windows RAID setup.

I have no idea if it really speeds things up or not.

Sounds like your NAS box is doing about the same thing as my linux box. I have 4 drives in it but I keep a monitor, keyboard, mouse hooked to it and I have it setup for a development box, encoding box, file server, a nice all in 1 solution to about everything I can think of. This way I can turn off other systems at night.

Or a NAS, or a USB attached drive, or.. about anywhere you want to set it up.