Manually synchronizing folders (laptop<->destop)

Ok, here's my problem: old desktop with Win98 (and some four-five linux distros) and new laptop with Vista Business (and two Linuxes).
I have now the same copy of my "myDocs" folder with several hundreds text files. I have now no sort of connection between the systems, neither wired nor wireless. Communications are 'by hand', via usb sticks and CD-DVD RW.

What would be the best strategy to synchronize the two folders on both systems so that I can work on my laptop and on my destop without having to remember which files I modified?

I thought I could syncronize both folders with a "transitional" folder on a CD-RW but there seems to be some problems in adding sessions with Vista to a CD made with Win98 and viceversa (Vista made one of my CD-RW unusable, I had to resort to Linux to forcefully format it).

Right now I'm thinking to keep two CD-RWs, one for lap->desk and another for desk->lap. I hope Syncback can manage the readonly attribute under win98.

But I'm sure you've got better ideas!
I am all ears.


PS
Later on I will run some cat5e wire through the walls and probably will add a wireless module to my old desktop. But for a few months I'll have to make do.

 

For me, I take out the cannon to shoot the flies.

I have my own subversion server(as I mainly work with source code on linux) and sync my stuffs there including auxillary files under Windows using http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ as the Windows client, which integrate well with the Explorer.

 

Why not periodically move the laptop right beside the desktop connect the two via a hub or a crossover cable and sync that way.

Gary

 

I second the Subversion recommendation.

Subversion is available for Windows (though I've never run it on Windows), so if you don't have access to a server, just run it on one of the two Windows systems.

As far as the physical aspect of the communication, I suggest getting a router and putting them both on the same network. Of course, there's no reason you couldn't use the USB drive with Subversion instead... it's just a little less elegant IMO.

 

You can use a tool like Subversion or simply use built in file search of WIndows and Linux to search all files and sort them according to time stamp to bring up all the recent modifications; simple as that (I normally use search+sort method to track modifications when I need to).

Or if you switch between them a lot, then it would be easer to maintain the primary working copy of your documents folder on a USB flash drive, then take regular backups on to your notebook or desktop.

 

This Subversion thinghy is beginning to grow on me.
I've skimmed throught the book pages and it would be nice to have it. Before reading the whole stuff let me ask a few questions to you, Subversion users...

I gather that the subversion server has to reside on the same system that holds the repository. Right?
Ok, that would be the desktop. I have Windows 98 and several flavors of Linux in there.

1) Can Win98SE run subversion's server on FAT32 without slowing to a crawl?

2) Should the server and client be running at the same time? Or can they exchange data through a common buffer?
It would be nice to be able to use this system in a Windows/Linux mixed environment. This is sure possible when I have separate systems. But here's an example of what I want to do:
I have text, word, odt and proprietary format documents on my FAT32 backup partition. That would become Subversion's repository. I will then have a copy of it in Win98 (what now is my 'main' working directory), a copy of it in one of my ext3 partitions and the same on my laptop (one copy in vista NTFS, one copy in ext3 for Debian).
Now, when I modify a file under Linux on the desktop, the win98 server cannot be running. And Win98 cannot access the ext3 partition. Can Subversion copy to a fat32 partition only the files that were modified, avoiding me to copy every time I logout some 8 GB of data? Or should I let Linux work directly on a FAT32 partition?

3) How big can the repository get if I store previous versions of all my files? How often do you have to 'reset' the repository?

Using a CVS software to synch only two Windowses might be an overkill, but if I can use it to sync 3 or 4 windowses and some 6-7 Linuxes... well, that maybe nice.

 

Haven't tried, but I can't see why it should be a problem.

The server has to be running.

You don't have a third (old cheap) computer to act as server? That'd be ideal, since SVN doesn't really have anything to help you share files across different OS'es on the same system.

That's probably what I'd do in your case, yeah.

Depends on the data. With plaintext files, it only stores the differences between each revision, so that doesn't take up too much space. With binary data, it stores a separate copy, as far as I know.
However, I doubt it's going to take up too much space.
How much data do you have now?

By the way, I haven't tried it myself, but you might want to check out Bazaar as well. Unlike SVN, it doesn't require a central repository, so it might be easier to share between different OS'es on the same computer and such.

 

If you are going to run subversion this is going to require some sort of connection between the two machines which you said you didn't have and weren't going to have for a while.

If you ARE going to have a connection you can use the bulit in Vista sync tool.

Gary

 

What about Breifcase that comes with Windows? Does that help with folders sync?