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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

Except you'd have to maintain two computers and sync the data all the time.

I prefer notebook+external monitor at home. Although I admit to an extra gaming desktop PC, but who still uses those?

My computing setup is the same in spirit as the one described in the article. In my experience, the maintenance overhead is quite small and syncing is a non-issue with a nix tool called unison. It's basically a bi-directional rsync.

Keeping my working directories in sync is as simple as running unison each time I boot my netbook only. This assumes that you have an internet accessible nix machine already in place for other purposes. Understandably, that may not always be the case.

SYncing data has become significantly easier than in the days of windows briefcase and other such abortions. Dropbox springs to mind.

Even if it is significantly easier than in the old days, it might not easy and reliable enough.

Are you personally using Dropbox to sync data between two machines you regularly use? (An answer to that would help me decide how much weight to give to your comment.)

I'm using a combination of Dropbox and SkyDrive (OneNote!) to synchronize between the three machines which I use daily.

The documents on SkyDrive are also shared with two colleagues.

It works well for everything except the TrueCrypt partition I have. Per-file encryption would be more effective, but I have yet to find a nice tool.

For me the solution to replace TrueCrypt was about finding encFS. Because I use Windows/OSX, I even bought BoxCryptor which is commercial implementation of encFS.

While I was at school I used dropbox to sync all my course materials, notes, papers etc between my home desktop and my laptop. It worked really well and I never had trouble with it. I mostly did it because, at home, I preferred working with the larger screen and more comfortable keyboard that I had with my desktop.

When working collaboratively with small teams and shared folders it was more problematic, dealing with all the different document files that got created when there were conflicts was problematic. We ended up just going with Google docs for collaborative papers.

Of course. I use it for 5 machines. Plus game club members = another 2 dozen - share an art folder.

I use no USB thumbdrives any more, no disks, no media of any kind. Haven't for two years now. Dropbox is enough. NOt great, but enough.

Keeping in sync is even more of a nightmare if you follow the advice to have a desktop Windows PC and a portable Mac.

The advice here could be summarized simply: "Buy what you need, when you need it." In the computer purchasing game, procrastination almost always pays dividends.

Unless you use the two computers for different tasks; then there's no syncing.

However, there is also what Henry Ford once said that if you need a machine and do not buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it but do not have it

As someone who recently started using 2 machines on a daily basis Dropbox and git repos for code are more than enough to solve this for me. Anything I need I have on either machine. It's perfect.

> sync the data all the time

If you use them for different purposes then what is there really to sync?

Your e-mail is probably already device-independent, Chrome and Firefox provide their own mechanisms for syncing, and putting the "final products" -- edited photos, videos, game saves, docs and repositories -- somewhere online, on a home server, or an external drive will be enough.

Here is my system:

Mail is all IMAP. I don't bother using a client on the PC, usually usually the website on the Mac, sometimes postbox.

Files that need to be on both are on dropbox.

Contacts are in the cloud

Media is in the cloud (Dropbox or iTunes match)

Yeah, that's it.

Rather than syncing, you can just treat the laptop as a dumb terminal. tmux & Emacs tramp make editing remote files just about as easy as editing local files. Run an ssh on port 443 so that it's usable where port 22 is blocked.

I use Emacs all day every day, and I wouldn't call Tramp easy or reliable.

Network drives, icloud, dropbox, carbonite, rsync, vnc, github, bitbucket, imap, gmail, lots of easy to use options today.

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