Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’m refreshing this story just a bit due to a very dumb error I made concerning setting up the user home folder. The previous instructions worked just fine for the purposes outlined in the article, but they’re not the right way to do it. Everything is all better now.

Originally published 1 June 2005.
One of Tiger’s new features is the ability to synchronize home folders between multiple Macs. This can be useful in any number of situations, and as an example to simplify the explanation of how to set up home folder synchronization and how it works, let’s create a hypothetical company with a hypothetical user, Roy, who has just been hired to do a job that involves some travel. Roy will be at his desk some part of the time and on the road for the remainder. On Roy’s desk is an iMac G5, and he’ll receive an iBook as his traveling companion. Roy has the need to synchronize the files and folders in his home folder between the iMac and the iBook. When Roy is on the road for a week or two, without access to the company LAN, and he makes changes to a bunch of files, those changes need to be reflected on his iMac when he returns. Conversely, when Roy is about to leave on a business trip, he needs to take with him the same files and folders on his iBook that are on his iMac.
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