A few months ago I migrated from Apple, which I’ve been using for a number of years, to a Windows machine. With the release of lots of exciting new things for Apple, namely the Core Duo, which came nearly six months ahead of when I was expecting it, and Bootcamp, which was totally unexpected, I’m slightly regretting my change. Still, I’m glad I have easy access to OS X + *nix + Windows now, even though I’ll likely migrate back to Apple in a few years.
One of the usual problems with getting a new computer is getting all the information off of the old one, and, unfortunately, there still doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this. I had initially set up the Mac to allow Windows File Sharing through SMB, and connected to it using the Windows network browsing capabilities, but in the process of attempting to set up Wireless networking I managed to break this and haven’t been able to get it working since. The main thing I’m attempting to retrieve from the Mac at this point in time is several Gigs of music I’ve accumulated over the years, and I actually tried transferring the files when SMB was working, but encountered an error (not too surprising given how lengthy a transfer that would be).
There are a few other options — I could turn the Mac into an FTP server or an HTTP server and download via that. About a year ago I was toying with the idea of setting up my computer as an FTP server so that I could access files remotely, but if I wanted to do so again I’d have to refamiliarize myself with the possible issues that could arise, so I was reluctant to do so. Setting up Apache on the Mac is simple and straightforward, and it would be relatively easy to handle sending files… But I still feel reluctant about it, perhaps superstitiously. The last option is to burn CDs of music. It would definitely work, but it’d take several hours at least to organize and burn and transfer.
One day on Digg I saw an article to the effect of “Top 10 Free Mac Utilities” — Scanned down the list, saw this one called FolderShare – Surprisingly, given the title of the article, this program isn’t primarily a Mac application, given that it was acquired by Microsoft, but it does have a Mac port. I tried it out. Set up the program to point to my music directory on the Mac, and to point to an empty folder on my PC. Within a day I managed to have 2/3rds of my music collection available on my PC. It’s not fast, but it’s easy and it works in the background while I’m doing my normal tasks on the computer. Worth checking out if you’re in need of something to casually synchronize files between machines.
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