MacBook Air Experiment Phase 2

If you follow the site, you know that a few months ago I pondered the role of MacBook Air in the Apple portable line-up. After mulling it over, I got one and ran it as I have every other laptop I’ve owned: my one and only computer.

The second phase of the experiment is a paradigm shift for me. I’ve never split my work across two computers before.  Every other “second” computer I’ve owned has been to kick around for experimentation or testing.  Never was it to be a workhorse like the Air.

But in keeping with the premise of the experiment, a couple weeks ago I put a mid-2007 Aluminum iMac on my desk.

At first, it felt horribly slow until I remembered that it only had 1GB of RAM.  Uh, no. 4GB upgrade ordered and installed. Now it’s acceptable performance. Not so great that I miss it when I’m on the laptop, though and that should be a criterion for someone who pushes their computer a lot harder than I do: if your laptop and desktop perform the same, dump one.

I decided to setup the iMac by doing a restore of my old black MacBook’s TimeMachine backup. (Long story short, this is interesting to do without a working Leopard install disk. Perhaps an article for another day?)  That restore set it up with everything that I had before the Data Diet.  And just like that, my data felt “whole” again. As much as I love the solid-state drive of the Air, its capacity limits (and the resulting storage tricks to get around it) bothered me – I would much rather have all of my data with me on the road. But of course, having the all of the data intact on a non-portable doesn’t satisfy that desire either. That brings us to the big dilemma: how to manage data across both computers.

I tend to break down data into two categories: Installables (things that can be reinstalled from disk or download) and User Data (stuff we create). Installables in this scenario were easy. Since I had already pared down the list of applications on the Air to the essentials, I simply left its Applications and OS intact from the Data Diet. At many clients, we deploy a solution that we refer to generically as Loadset Imaging. That would make this scenario equally easy because both computers’ Installables would be cloned from a master copy. This has many efficiencies for larger deployments, but might have diminishing returns in a small case like this. (Way beyond the scope of this article – want more on this topic, leave a comment.) For now, I’ll simply end up applying updates to software twice when I need it.

Since we’ve already determined that my User Data is way too big for the Air, the focus is on what I need for the road. I’m treating it like I treat the iPhone – it can be completely wiped (or stolen or damaged) without any concern for data because it all resides on home unit. To that end, I went ahead and enabled FileVault to secure any and all user data on the machine (as opposed to my segmented method for encrypting sensitive data and leaving things like my iTunes library insecure).

I also knew that like the iPhone, I’d be relying heavily on MobileMe. MobileMe services are probably the least understood of Apple’s product line-up because they offer so many little things – and you may only really use one or two of them. Here, I’m certainly getting my $99/year worth.

In Phase 1 of the Experiment, you might recall that I punched in my MobileMe account into my Airport Base Station for the purpose of accessing its disk contents securely across the Internet. In Phase 2, I have taken it the next step by enabling “Back to my Mac” – which not only lets me access the iMac’s hard drive in the same way as the Airport disk, but also let’s me remote control the iMac’s screen securely without a VPN and without any heavy configuration. It was quite literally a one-button operation, and has already come in handy for accessing some data I forgot to grab in advance.

For calendars, I already use MobileMe sync for push to the iPhone. Adding the Air to that mix was really a no brainer. While I was visiting the MobileMe sync preferences, I went ahead and had the Air grab Bookmarks and Address Book Contacts the same way the iPhone does. For computers, you can add more data to sync up and I told it to keep my Dashboard widgets, Dock items, and Keychains in sync. It has worked flawlessly.

So that’s the small stuff. What about the big stuff? I decided to pitch my iTunes Library off the Air because my iPhone will have all of it when I’m on the road and it is certainly more attached to me than the laptop. The iPhoto Library got manually pared down to about a couple hundred of my favorite photos (mostly of Jack) for the purposes of desktops and screensavers, and when someone making casual conversation unwittingly opens themselves to a “look at how cute is my kid” session.

Then there’s the really big ones: Documents and Mail.

Mail is mostly easy because I have IMAP accounts so the new messages are stored on-server, thus iPhone, Air, and iMac see them all the same way. The problem has been the multiple gigabytes of e-mail I’ve neglected to archive since mid-2006. (Microsoft Entourage needed archiving pretty regularly or it became unstable. Apple Mail, not so. I switched when I moved to Intel Mac in mid-2006.) As I write this, I’m on my third try at an archiving system from Apple Mail on the iMac. Once that’s done, then they are not part of Mail’s Library but just Documents like any other. I’ll need to run this semi-regularly to keep from getting in the same mess down the road. (Perhaps yet another article in the future describing Federal law and email archiving options? Comments welcome.)

For Documents, I’ve been trying two approaches. The first is MobileMe’s iDisk. iDisk is shared space on Apple’s servers for storing whatever you want. What’s nice about it is that it’s heavily integrated into the system, and for the Air, I can keep a local copy of the iDisk for times when I have no Internet and when I go back on-line, the Air will sync it up. Unfortunately, the paranoid in me won’t let me put sensitive data there. This, I think is the biggest problem in “cloud computing” – things like Google Apps, QuickBooks Online, and all the SaaS Web 2.0 solutions out there: trusting the security of the provider. Followed shortly by runner up: what happens when my Internet goes offline? (Yet another article for another day. Interested?  I’d love to hear from you.) I toyed with the idea of a secure sparsebundle to reside on the iDisk to protect the data but the performance made this idea unworkable.

The other method is that I’m trying out is third-party sync software (currently using Decimus’ Synk) for keeping my desktops synced up when the Air has the iMac’s home folder mounted as a file server. This has a small ways to go because it’s making me rely on a manual process to sync up.  The process simply needs to be automated or else I suspect I’ll have a ton of conflicts.  I’d also like to see if I could pull this off with my old friend rsync and then automate the whole thing via a LaunchDaemon. (I can hear many of you saying “what?” – these are tools embedded in Mac OS X that we can leverage to build our own solutions. We currently use them as a replacement for Apple’s HomeSync when backing up home folders on a network.)

But for now, I’m primarily doing manual drag and drop which will become untenable very quickly. I’ll have to settle on something. There have already been a few instances where I needed something off the iMac but had no Internet.  At times like those, I consider dropping $450 on the 128GB SSD upgrade for the Air and calling this experiment done.  Then I calm down and come back to the document sync question.  Stay tuned.  When I have the answer, I’ll share it with all of you.

Ultimately, I like having the iMac on my desk always at the ready.  However, it could just as easily be the Air with a nice new 24″ Apple Display and a big fat hard drive, and that would save me all of this sync nonsense.  As I said at the beginning, this is a paradigm shift for me.  For those of you who routinely use more than one Mac in this manner, what say you?

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