Dear Unplggd,
I'm looking to buy a Macbook to complement my home PC and using the PC for my main file storage. Is there an easy way to sync the folders or share files from my Mac to my PC (and vice versa)? I'm not even sure if this is possible. Please let me know, thanks!
-Angie from Portland, OR
Hey Angie!
Thanks for writing. We're glad to hear you're embracing both the Mac and PC world - a little diversity never hurt anyone, right?
Anyway, about your file sharing question. It's a tricky one, but we'll give it a go. Basically, Macs and PCs use different file systems to organize files. So, you can't just plug a drive formatted with Windows and have it instantly pick up on the Mac with no issues. Additionally, the way each operating system handles file sharing is a little bit different too, so you'll have to keep that in mind.
Luckily for you, we've seen this issue come up before. The team at Lifehacker has done an excellent write-up regarding file sharing over a network between Mac and PCs that you can refer to below:
Basically, using the steps outlined by Lifehacker, you can easily set up your Mac to mount your shared PC drive/folder every single time it boots up and vise versa. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact us.
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Needed to do this at work when I switched fields and had to use a PC all of a sudden, but have Macs at home.
Check out DropBox, http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast which is a cross-platform syncing application that comes with 2gig of free online storage space. Also has a great way of sharing files by emailing people a link. And everything is backed up online should anything happen to your computer. It's all there in the video.
I pay for a MobileMe / me.com account and use DropBox 'cause it's way easier to use and doesn't have the syncing difficulty that my me.com account had.
view warrenpeace's profile
Useful info!
view aringpingpong's profile
Diggworthy? You betcha!
view ekoshyun's profile
I second @warrenpeace. DropBox all the way for this. It was designed for it from the ground up and is insanely fast at what it does. If you need more than 2GB you can pay only $10 a month and get a nice 50GB of synchronized data on any OS :)
view stevenhaddox's profile
Dropbox rocks! It's profoundly easy to set-up and use.
Another one to look at would be Mobile Me by Apple. It not only syncs your Macs and PCs, it syncs your iPhone. If you add a new person you need to meet with on your iPhone it will update your iCal and contacts on you Mac and your Outlook and calendar on your PC. It also comes with 20GB/yr.
If you just need to share files tho, dropbox is the way to go.
view Scottsoutdoor's profile
If you need to sync, you probably want this DropBox thing or some other software/service. But if you just need to network the two computers together to share files, then there is no need to pay extra for something that is built right into your two computers. All you need is a router or Ethernet cable.
There is a nice guide here: http://guides.macrumors.com/Networking_Windows_with_Mac_OS_X
There are many others out there.
view jyw's profile
If you're going to go with a sync solution, Mesh is where it's at. You get 5GB free, it has clients for Mobile devices as well as Mac's and Windows. Plus they have a web interface so you can access your files anywhere in the world with a browser.
Much better than dropbox.
That said, for a simple home solution .... just mount the files as outlined in the article.
view RJHD3's profile