I find that I am constantly split across my laptop and my home desktop rig for my studies. For example, I will begin a project then locally save it to my laptop and have to transfer it to my desktop to continue working on the same thing. Same situation applies vice versa.
I'm currently doing the ghetto method of USB transfers (having folders that are named the same then just drag and drop and replace/update everything that way haha). I have found this process to be clunky and pretty annoying!
Google drive is a possibility but then I have to deal with dragging and dropping etc. I'd prefer something a bit more direct (something similar to saving directly to a local system)
I have a feeling this might be a networking problem but I'm really not sure, so I thought I'd ask the wizards of the Internets - you guys!
TLDR; Need to save files (preferably directly) to the same location but access them on different computers.
My remedy is an USB closure for SSD M.2 and I store projects on it. No coping involved, just plug closure on either laptop on workstation - in both cases it is mounted to the same path.
There is no other efficient way for me due to the project sizes and number of files.
i would recommend using syncthing its a powerful program and its open source which is really nice https://syncthing.net and you can set it up so it has versions so itll keep older versions so if you fucked something up your safe
If your router has a NAS option through SMB or FTP you can have a program that sync specific folders when you connect to your network. You'll have a bit of latency depending on the files you're syncing but I think it's the most effective and economical way.
Depending on how comfortable you are with storing things "in the cloud", you can use a file sync service. Some of them (like Dropbox) only sync their own folder, so you would have to store everything inside them. Other services will let you to sync existing folders from your computer (for example, you could have D:\Project in one computer, and E:\Workstuff\Project in another computer, and have this two folders sync with each other). In that case you would be limited by the "cloud storage" service capacity, but something like Mega will give you 50GB with the free account (they use an open-source client and some form of encryption). A potential downside of online syncing is that it's almost instantaneous: you don't need to manually sync anything, but if you regret overwriting a file 3 seconds later, it is overwritten everywhere (some services support "versioning", though, so you can recover older versions anyway.
If you don't want to store anything online, you can sync directly across computers - but both have to be on simultaneously, of course. You can use something like Synctoy as long as computers can see each other (either via LAN, or using something like TeamViewer's PC-to-PC VPN for syncing purposes). The "remote" PC (in the eyes of synctoy) would have to have the involved folders shared (which you may or may not like).
Finally, if you don't want to have multiple copies at all, but just one physical copy that is accessible to all your computers, you will need some form of network storage, and one that is available from all the locations in which you use your laptop (may want to check Level1Techs' video on de-googlifying and making your own web storage).
It really depends on the files. If its text docs, excel etc. google docs/drive purely online works for me. But you can have gdrive(or dropbox, onedrive or whatever) sync a folder(gdrive is on windows and mac only), but i haven't had the best experience with that.
If your project involves lots of different weird files and you not afraid of the console you could give version control systems(VCS)a go. SVN or Mercurial are somewhat simple to get into, but if you wanna get fancy Git is more advanced and flexible, but i suspect that would be overkill for you.
You can get private VCS repositories on bitbucket(Mercurial, Git) or gitlab.(Git) for free, which is the central server that keeps track of your files, which may be a slight hassle to set up. But after the setup you run something like git pull before you start working and git commit git push to upload. And even if you start editing without pulling from the server first, auto-merging will let you keep your changes with an extra command or two.
It might be overkill, but its really efficient since it only transfers differences from the last change so you can sync without having to copy/move all files every time.
Thanks for the pointers guys, will definitely check them out.
@jak_ub Probably the easiest and quickest way to do this haha, might have to Frankenstein a usb 3.0 micro B to Ethernet since my laptop is super old and only has USB 2.0 hahah.
@hjort-e That sounds super awesome! Although at the moment I probably won't have enough time to learn all the commands. Will probably look into that for a semester break project or something
