I became a mac user a bit over a year ago when my windohs box finally died. I wanted something new and easier so off the the Apple Store we went. I purchased a 20″ iMac, and the world was a happy place. Sometime later my windohs laptop mainboard went sizzle and I needed a new laptop. My wife, how by the way is super cool headed off the the Apple Store and got me the machine I wanted. Correction she got me a better machine that what I had decided on. I was going to be happy with a 13″ MacBook, the wife (did I mention that she was super cool) got me the fully loaded 15″ MBP. Mike was happy, and still is. So now we have 2 happy Macs and I want a way to back up and sync files between the pair.
I looked at the Apple Time Capsule – great features, not so great on the price. 1TB at the time was $499, and I couldn’t quite do all that I wanted to. FreeNas was looking pretty good as a low overhead option, and I had a bunch of parts laying about to build a system. I did not have a vast amount of storage, but was able to try it out as a Time Machine backup. This set up worked well, but still was not all that I was looking for. So after much looking I stumbled across this post http://tinyurl.com/lqtr24 on how to make a server using Ubuntu, netatalk and avahi. It was promising and since I have some knowledge of Ubuntu, not too difficult. I ordered a new small form factor case, an Intel Atom mb/cpu combo and a hard drive and it was off to the races. I have been running this set up for a few weeks now and it is working great. In later posts I will talk about some of the things that I am doing with it, and some of the custom configs that I am doing to make this a great option for syncing 2 macs 🙂