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Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

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Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#1

Post by sarahdellysse »

I rarely stray from my work-from-home office desk and I can see the value proposition of building a desktop PC to be my daily driver. For the past decade or two, I've used high-end laptops docked to a monitor mouse and keyboard. When I do have to do work outside home, I'm rarely in a place with good enough internet to go the route of RDPing into my home and using a laptop as a thin client.

I can't be the only one with this issue right? I run Windows 11 on all of my desktop/laptop machines, and it'd be nice to also have my WSL2 distros synced as well.

Anyone have any tips?

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#2

Post by java-man »

I'd recommend sync.com - end-to-end encrypted, cross-platform, and have one convenient feature called "vault" which is basically a partition that lives in the cloud only, that is it's not being sync'ed across the clients.

(i am not affiliated with them, just a happy customer)

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#4

Post by navjack27 »

OneDrive? WSL is already in Windows so you don't really need to sync anything if you think about it. Each of my devices kind of play a role and they don't need to all be whatever you would consider synced. Edge syncs... OneDrive shares data... What else do you need to sync?

I'm not dismissing you I just think you need to come up with a more cohesive definition of synchronization of blank. Do you want your terminals to have their histories synchronized? Do you want the entire hard drives to be the same? Do you want your web browsers settings to be the same?

You could even use git for something like this. And you could just pull repos locally for projects that you're working on and just synchronize them between computers that way and just host a local gittea or something.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#6

Post by stephenr »

I use a simple approach.

I use an external TB3 m.2 SSD for everything work related. When going away when I may/will need to work, I unplug the drive from my desktop and put it in my bag with my laptop.

The drive (and tb3) is fast enough to run multiple VMs from it without a problem.

For smaller things I use regular sync tools (ie browser bookmarks in iCloud; IDE settings sync via JetBrains).

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#7

Post by hammyhavoc »

Personally, I switched to NixOS to be able to turn any computer into "my computer" via a reproducible and declarative config, and I keep the config in a Git repository, sync files via Nextcloud, amidst a smattering of other Docker containers on my server.

Chezmoi is good for imperative dotfiles too—I keep those in a Git repository too.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#8

Post by mkl »

SyncThing. It can be run in both Windows and WSL on the same machine.

If you were exclusively working in MS Office, OneDrive could work, but with anything else it gets really frustrating as it syncs when it feels like it - you can't force it.

Re: Ask HN: How to keep desktop and laptop in sync?

#10

Post by authorfly »

stephenr wrote: post #6

I use a simple approach. I use an external TB3 m.2 SSD for everything work related. When going away when I may/will need to work, I unplug the drive from my desktop and put it in my bag with my laptop. The drive (and tb3) is fast enough to run multiple VMs from it without a problem. For smaller things I use regular sync tools (ie browser bookmarks in iCloud; IDE settings sync via JetBrains).

How did you format the drive to avoid things like symbolic link issues?
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