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Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows?
aaaaaaargh! writes "I'm using a laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 for work, a netbook with Ubuntu 9.10 when I'm outside, Mac OS X 10.5 for hobby projects, and Windows XP for gaming. For backups, I'm currently using Jungle Disk and Apple's Time Machine, and I use a local svn repository for my work data. Now I need to frequently exchange and synchronize OpenOffice and Latex files and source code in various cross-platform programming languages between one machine and another. Options range from putting everything online (but Jungle Disk disks seem to be too slow for anything else than backup), storing my data on external media like USB sticks or SD cards, or working with copies by synchronizing folders over the network. I don't want to give my data away to some server outside without strong encryption (controlled by me, including the source code) and external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste. The solution should be reliable, relatively failsafe, as simple as possible, and allow me to continue to use Jungle Disk for backup. So what would you recommend?"
I second this, although I use Git. Works great.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Except it didn't exactly answer his question. He appears to favor local storage. Ha already has a backup solution and if he wanted a snetwork share, I'm pretty sure anyone running the 3 major OSes can figure out how to share a drive via NFS/AFP/SMB.
For a home user, ZFS's big achilles is the inability to change raidz geometry. Most home users add another drive to increase capacity, *not* another raidz of drives into a pool. Nor do they typically want to replace all their raidz drives with larger drives. ZFS fails on that particular common home storage scenario. Everyone knows it and it's been talked about to death. And btrfs is looking better every day.
The answer he's looking for is probably some form of rsync or unison solution. Depends on the complexity of his syncing. And if he needs/wants some form of version control. He knows how to use SVN so he's probably not needing version control.
I'm curious too; I have to keep local assets for CGI apps in sync on a few different systems and rsync is the best I've come up with. You can't drop extra files into the asset directory structure and you can't rely on their state to tell you anything about the need to sync.