Keeping my computers in sync¶

I don't have any laptops to throw into the mix, like Martin Fowler in a related article. But I work both at home and at two different work locations. Now how do I keep everything in sync and how do I keep myself sane?

First things first: my university machine has an excellent network connection and is allways on. That's my server and the center of my electronic life :-)

• IMAP. All my mail is stored in IMAP on the university machine. Accessible from home and the other work location. The inbox and the folders. I'm still using pine, so I stored the address book in IMAP, too, so that's synced. And I've put up a web interface (squirrelmail) so that I can access my mail also from other people's machines.
• My programs and my documents are all in a source code versioning system. One central place to store them, everytime you start working you give the command to refresh your local directory and after you've finished you commit the changes. The version control server is again my university machine. Currently I use it for almost everything, even individual papers (just one word document with a few separate images). The server is CVS at the moment, but I'll probably switch to subversion.

Email, important documents, source code. That's about all. Some loose bits hanging around on some harddisks (mp3s for instance). But most of it is covered.

And, yes, I backup the mail directories, the cvs repository (and the zope database) every night and upload it to a machine 4 kilometers away.