Hello, I am looking to setup a auto sync between my powerbook and my desktop PC(Windows Xp and Ubuntu). My desktop has 100GB unpartitioned on a 300GB drive, i want to use that space to sync it with my powerbook, but i am unsure which file system would be the best to store my osx files in. I pretty much want to mirror the contents of my power book on my desktop, so if my laptop fails I still have the files. Any suggestions? -Jacob

if you want it to be viewable and writable to both windows and linux, I'd say format it to Fat32, so it'll be accessible to pretty much all 3 OSes.

You can guarantee that no file information will be lost by using the tar program. By copying straight to FAT32 you *might* lose file ownership and permissions data. If you feel like spending some money, there is a program called MacDrive that will let you mount HFS+ volumes in Windows.

You really don't have to do anything special filesystem-wise. To sync the mac, you can just mount that partition (whatever it may be, FAT32, NTFS, or otherwise) on the mac via SMB/Samba.

I would say that the bigger concern is syncing Ubuntu and Windows, since they are on the same system. You can't just use a network protocol to do the hard work.

I recall that FAT32 has some limitations, but I don't remember what they are. I also recall that there are some open source ext2/ext3 drivers out there for windows. Perhaps the best idea would be to make the partition ext2/ext3, which both Win and Linux would be able to read.

You could use Subversion for keeping your computers in sync. Here's an article by someone who is doing what you want to do.