[OS X TeX] Keeping TeX installations synchronized between machines

[chlists at me.com]

Hi Chris,

[...]

> I'm talking about everything, not just the main TeX installation and app versions, but also all local files (currently under ~/Library/texmf), all TeXShop files (macros, engines, etc), things related to BibDesk, blah, blah, blah.

Someone in this thread has mentioned synchroniser applications. I have been using ChronoSync (http://www.econtechnologies.com, $40) for a few years now to do exactly what you are looking for. I keep my big Mac sync'ed to my laptop, including some of the data in ~/Library/Application Support and also the TexShop files, BibDesk files, ~/Library/texmf (templates etc), and data for other applications (Firefox profiles, DevonThink scripts/files etc). I just mount the laptop in FW target disk mode and treat it like an external disk to synchronise documents, photos etc (all in all about +100 GB). In addition to this I use SVN for keeping track of my bibliographies & larger *.tex documents to avoid mixing/deletion of different versions when I've been on the road. One could potentially also sync /usr/local/... and other "personal" unix folders this way (If your machines have the same architecture, of course).

AFAIK there's also now a separate "agent" application which lets you synchronise multiple machines over a network, but I've not tried it yet. Before this sounds like a sales pitch, there is also other applications for syncing machines, before I used an app from Querasoft, can't remember the name, but this was in the early OS X days. A free option is RSync but the learning curve was a little too steep at the time I tried it. There is an OS X interface to it.

I guess it depends on whether the method above works for your setup (I recommend investigating the ChronoAgent option), but I definitely would prefer this one compared to sending out personal data into the cloud without further control. Having said that I think Dropbox concept which was mentioned in the thread earlier is quite sexy.

Hope this helps.
Christian