In a break from the usual Teaching posts, I descend into a bit of geek.
Having spoken to a few people recently about how I handle my data, I thought it’d be useful to post the process. Here’s how I keep two laptops, two Operating Systems and a USB stick synced with Dropbox, shared partions and Synctoy.
It looks complicated, but it’s out of necessity; I have to share data between 3 locations and two Operating Systems.
Macbook
The Macbook is my main laptop which runs just Kubuntu. This is nice and simple, anything changed on here gets synced via Dropbox.
Samsung NC10
The NC10 is my school laptop bought as it was super-light, and also I didn’t have a Windows install before that. I use it to deliver lessons, but I don’t have access to wireless or the school network. It runs dual-boot, with a shared FAT partition between Windows and Linux. The hard drive is paritioned into two, the latter being mounted as ‘My Documents’ in Windows. This is then mounted to /media/ under Linux and my Linux folders are symlinked to the appropriate ones on the partition. This lets me have data on just Windows, and just Linux, and to share certain folders which are always the same. Both OS are running Dropbox too so the shared folders are synced to the Macbook.
USB Drive
As mentioned, I don’t have access to the school network so I need to use a USB drive to get data to and from it. I use Windows Synctoy to keep the folders from the Windows’ Dropbox synced with the folders on the USB. If I add anything to the USB it gets back to Windows and therefore Dropbox (and vice-versa).
So there we have it (I think), a setup which stops me having to think about my data and let software keep it organised for me.
