In a previous post I remember recommending you to have about 30GBs for your system drive after partitioning your drive - I take back what I said! The reason why I had such a huge system before was because I installed Tiger on top of Panther - the Panther was pre-installed in the powerbook. After doing a clean install of Tiger, I just realized how much shite there was on my hard drive - No - I don't need over 1GB of printer drivers - No - I don't need 'Garage-Band-Which-Takes-Up-Over-2-Bloody-Gigs-Of-Space" and I definitely don't need that steaming pile of cack called iphoto.
When you do a clean installation of Tiger - don't forget to click on customize to remove these things which you may ever so slightly not need (like a gigs worth of printer drivers!). Anyway, now I have a clean Tiger installation which is less than 4GBs. Now on to the subject of this post.....
Just like the time I worked with windows machines - I had all my important docs and files on a portable hard disk which I would attach to my work machine and then bring home to attach to my home machine. The annoying thing with windows is that most of the environment and program settings are kept in the registry - like dreamweaver for example. If I set up some sites in dreamweaver on one machine - I would then have to do the same on the other.
Mac users know that nearly all personal environment and program settings are stored in their home directory - meaning that most environment and program settings done one one machine can be ported to another machine with ease. Use Net Info Manager in the utilities folder to point your home directory to a portable medium like "/Volumes/<name of drive here>/<name of home directory here>/" - do this for both your home and work machine and you are done.
Now the problem I had with this method was that I would have to carry a portable disk with me to work and back - I hate carrying anything on the train - get on a Tokyo train and you will know what I mean. I decided to resolve this to buy something that I have been putting off for a long time - an iPod Got myself an iPod photo 60GB. What I do is to create an encrypted disk image on the iPod and use ChronoSync to sync my home directory to the iPod from home, from the iPod to work and vice versa. I do have some problems in ChronoSync from time to time - For some reason, permissions don't remain intact for my mysql DB files. Currently looking around for alternatives and get the feeling that I am probably better of running something from the command line to do the syncing.
The iPod is much smaller than my portable 2.5inch HD and I can listen to some cool tunes on the train too - more about the iPod photo in a different post.
