Sync to a remote machine without using the CLI

Mar 23, '06 06:18:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I've read a dozen hints on related topics, but haven't seen anything that deals with precisely this issue. I have an iMac at work and a PowerBook at home. I wanted to keep the two machines in sync, but without lugging the PowerBook into the office. I also wanted to do this without opening the Terminal.

My criteria meant that the obvious (but not necessarily easy) solution, rsync, was ruled out. Folks suggested rsyncX, psync, and Unison, but I was most convinced by the arguments in favor of Chronosync. Chronosync costs money, but it does exactly what I need it to: it gives me all the power and flexibility of rsync, but with a nice, polished GUI.

But Chronosync has one significant limitation: it can only sync two volumes that one can mount locally. All the Chronosync documentation (which is quite thorough, by the way) presumes that you have two locally-mounted volumes, either over a LAN or through FireWire, etc. But, you'll recall I didn't want to haul the PowerBook into the office.

I thought I'd have to drop my 'no CLI' condition and turn to rsync, but then I read this hint on a related but different topic, and found the suggestion from jctull (scroll down a bit) about how to use SSH Tunnel Manager. Thus, the solution to my problem was to do the following:

  1. Use Tunnel Manager 2.0 to create an ssh tunnel from the PowerBook at home to the iMac at the office.
  2. Set up Tunnel Manager (following jctull's instructions in the above hint's comments) to forward port 10548 on the powerbook to port 548 (afp) on the iMac.
  3. Connect to localhost:10548, which mounts the iMac drive as an AFP volume on my PowerBook.
  4. Launch Chronosync, set up the sync, and go from there!
This all seems simple enough, and is a breeze to use now that it's set up. But I was rather surprised that no one had mapped out any sort of simple instructions to sync two machines not on a LAN without using the command line. My next step would be to automate this process with an AppleScript, but as you can likely tell from above, I'm not much of a programmer. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2006031815384912